A Tale of Two Rieslings

As I've mentioned in the past, I'd like to taste some more Rieslings. According to the wine goddess Andrea (Immer) Robinson, Rieslings are very versatile white wines that can pair well with food and are generally under-appreciated in the US. Since most of the food I eat on a regular basis (especially in the summertime) consists of veggies and fish, an exploration of Rieslings seems in order.

The two Rieslings I'm comparing here were not tasted back-to-back, but a couple days apart. And to foreshadow my conclusions here, neither compared to the Alsace Riesling we tasted during our "Big Six" tasting a couple weeks ago (I loved that wine!!), although one came close, and for almost half the price....

Bonny Doon vs Dr. Loosen
The two Rieslings tasted were the 2005 Bonny Doon Pacific Rim Dry Riesling and the 2005 Loosen "Dr. L" Riesling. In the traditional anti-establishment tradition of Bonny Doon, the Pacific Rim Dry Riesling was made from a blend of Washington State and Mosel (Germany) grapes; the Dr. L simply mentioned the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer region of Germany
as the source. Both wines were purchased at Total Wine in McLean, VA for $10 and $11, respectively.

Bonny Doon Pacific Rim Dry Riesling
As with all Bonny Doon wines, you can tell right away just from the bottle that the wine is going to be a little "different". ("Different" doesn't even begin to describe Bonny Doon founder and wine philosopher Randall Grahm - just check out their webpage and you'll see what I mean).

So, the idea behind the "Pacific Rim" Dry Riesling is that Washington State is a wonderful place to grow Riesling as the long, cool growing season allows the grapes to fully ripen while maintaining good natural acidity; however, Bonny Doon felt that German Rieslings have a "haunting floral perfume" to them that can't be matched. So they blend in approximately 25% German Riesling into 75% Washington State, et viola - the Pacific Rim Dry Riesling.

(Just for the record, Bonny Doon Vineyard started off just outside of Santa Cruz, CA. Always looking to expand vinilogical horizons, they have spread out to producing wine from Washington State, Italy, France, and probably a couple other countries / locales).

Tasting the Pacific Rim Dry Riesling
So I wanted to highlight that word, DRY, in the title for a reason - I now know what I need to look for in a Riesling to enjoy it - it has to be DRY!

Dry is kind of an interesting word in the wine lexicon, since is doesn't have an obvious meaning. I mean, how can a liquid be "dry", anyway? A lot of red wines may make your mouth feel dry, but that is actually due to their tannins, and is not what the term refers to in wine. In the wine world, dry refers to the fact that all of the grape's natural sugars have been converted via fermentation to alcohol. (Paradoxically, a "dry" county is one that doesn't allow alcohol, so it's no wonder people get confused with this term.) Most "normal" table wines are in fact "dry". Even wines that may seem sweet (many white wines for example) usually don't have any residual sugar left in them and it's just their flavors that make them appear sweet (with the major exception of dessert and fortified wines such as port and madeira).

Getting back to Rieslings - an important thing to look for in Rieslings to clue you in to their style is either the word "dry" on the label, or more likely their alcohol content. This Bonny Doon Pacific Rim was 12% alcohol (the Domaine Trimbach Alsace Riesling I loved so much from our Big Six Tasting was 12.5% alcohol); the Dr. L German Riesling was 8.5% (and as you'll see, this was not what I was looking for). With Rieslings in particular, there are two distinct styles that crop up - sweet and not-so-sweet. The sweet wines are the ones with a lower percent alcohol than the "not-so sweet" dry Rieslings (in general).

End of tangent - now for the tasting notes.

The 2005 Bonny Doon Pacific Rim Riesling had a big nose of pear, maybe lemon and a hint of floral. On the tongue it was nice and crisp, but not overly acidic - very well balanced. There was a hint of crisp apple, with some pear and citrus coming through. Overall we thought this wine had a Good Quality-to-Price Ratio, and will go down on our "buy again" list! We paired this with Indian cuisine and it worked fairly well.

Dr. Loosen - "the Man" of Riesling
So I wanted to do some research here to be able to tell you how important Ernst Loosen (loh-zen) was to world-wide Riesling production, but I couldn't find any pages detailing his influence. So you're just going to have to trust my memory in that I'm pretty sure he's taken his years of experience in Germany and has helped vineyards get Riesling get established in both New York State and Washington State (probably elsewhere as well). So when it comes to Riesling, I think Dr. L is something of "the Man".

Tasting the Loosen "Dr. L" Mosel-Saar-Ruwer Riesling
So the big downer here is that I should have looked at the label before popping this one open for dinner - having recently experienced the joys of dry Riesling, I thought this may go well with some grilled salmon we were having for dinner. D'oh! That 8.5% alcohol meant sweet sweet sweet - definitely nothing you'd want to mix with salmon. So I was a little annoyed at this wine for tricking me from the get-go, so may have been less objective in my analysis...

The Dr. L had apricot, citrus, and perhaps cut grass on the nose. On the tongue it was fruity, maybe with some pineapple, had a bit of gravel to it and had only a bit of acidity. Since it was so sweet I think this wine would need to be paired with really spicy foods if it had any chance to pair well. It had a very nice finish though.

Overall impression here is that if you like sweeter whites, you'd probably like this wine - I could tell it was crafted fairly well, but it just wasn't at all what I was looking for at the time so I couldn't really get into it. We Vacu-Vin'ed it and popped it back in the fridge, but even drinking it on its own the next day just wasn't doing it for me. Again - I'm just not really into sweet wines, so I think this is simply my palate versus any fault of the wine.

In Search of Dry Rieslings
So now that I know the importance of finding dry Rieslings, I'm in search of good examples under $20 (preferably under $15!). Anyone have any favorites? I'd love to hear about them, as I plan to continue my Riesling exploration as the mercury continues to rise this summer! In the meantime, I'm now going to be sure to check out alcohol content on each bottle before I buy it, and try to find some 12.5+% Rieslings to enjoy!

A Quick Foodie Post-Script
So I've gotten comments from folks wanting to know more about the food Kris and I have made to pair with some of our different wines. Well, as I mentioned before we were hoping for a dry Riesling to pair our salmon with the Dr. L Riesling, which didn't end up happening. But here was our meal nonetheless...

The salmon was pretty easy - we just cooked it on the grill in a foil packet with some onions and green garlic from our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture - I love the food we get each week!!) The side was a Sweet Corn and Black Bean Salad - a recipe we picked up from Whole Foods. This salad rocks!! It's a cold salad with corn, beans, onions and red pepper and a simple rice vinegar, olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper dressing. This is a great summer salad, and I recommend anyone living in a remotely warm place this summer check it out!

And the grand finale of the meal was a raspberry rhubarb pie, again made from super fresh CSA produce! I'm a big fan of rhubarb, and look forward to rhubarb pies each summer. I also made a strawberry rhubarb pie with berries we picked ourselves down the road at Butler's Orchard, a pick your own fruits and veggies place. Overall, I think the raspberries blend better with the tarter taste of rhubarb than strawberries do, which I think are more traditionally used. But both pies rock!

Tasting the Big Six

Ever since I started flipping through Andrea (Immer) Robinson's book Great Wine Made Simple, I have been itching to try out her series of recommended tastings to train the palate and help you learn to identify certain aspects / flavors / styles of wine. Well, last weekend I finally got my chance, as Kris and I held a "Big Six" tasting event!

The Big Six
The idea behind the Big Six is twofold: First, by tasting the big six grapes (Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon), you will have tasted the "guts" of roughly 80% of all wine produced throughout the world; Second, you get the opportunity to experience the full range of "bodies" - light, medium and full- in both red and white wines.

Robinson helpfully recommends specific wines in "budget", "moderate" and "splurge" monetary categories that she thinks will best illustrate varietal character and appropriate body for each grape. I found her list a very helpful starting point, and I stuck to it fairly closely. She recommends that all wines be selected from within the same price category, as you don't varying quality of wine interfering with the point of the tasting, namely varietal expression and body.

Kris and I decided in advance upon the "moderate" category - we wanted wines that tasted good, and were of high enough quality to accurately express varietal character and body, but we wanted them affordable enough so that participants could consider purchasing their favorites for casual dinners at home. This goes along with our general philosophy that wine is an "everyday beverage" - we like good wines that are affordable enough to enjoy each evening with dinner without feeling like we are blowing our budget.

Our Wine Selections
On to our selections. As I mentioned, the purpose of the Big Six is to distinguish differences in body across the major wine grapes of the world. For whites, Riesling typifies light-bodied, Sauvignon Blanc medium-bodied, and Chardonnay full-bodied; for reds, Pinot Noir typifies light-bodied, Merlot medium-bodied and Cabernet Sauvignon full-bodied. The following wines were purchased from Total Wine in McLean, VA:

Riesling: 2004 Domaine Trimbach (Alsace, France) - $16
Sauvignon Blanc: 2006 Stony Bay (Marlborough, NZ) - $12
Chardonnay: 2005 Franciscan Oakville Estate (Napa Valley, CA) - $13

Pinot Noir: 2006 Sockeye (Chile**) - $14
Merlot: 2003 Chateau St. Michelle (Columbia Valley, Washington) - $11.50
Cabernet Sauvignon: 2004 Simi Winery (Alexander Valley, CA) - $14

**Note: This is what happens when you don't do your research. I am a Pinot Noir neophyte, but have been interested in trying some Oregonian Pinots. Sockeye (like the salmon) sure sounds Northwest-ish, and this wine was filed under "Oregon". Turns out Sockeye sources grapes from different locales, and their 2003 was from Oregon, their 2004 was from Australia, and as I discovered upon returning home, their 2006 was from Chile! I thought this boded poorly for the tasting, since I have heard of a lot of great wines coming out of Chile and no one has ever mentioned Pinot...

The Wine Tasting Setup
To really be able to directly compare the different wines in the Big Six, Robinson recommends using 6 different glasses so that all wines could be poured at once. Thinking that this could end up pretty chaotic, I made a nifty little tasting mat to keep the wines in the right order.


Note to my viewers at home: this is actually a legal sized sheet of paper (8.5" x 14") - a standard 8.5" x 11" paper was just too small to allow for adequate spacing between the glasses!

So, everyone was provided with 6 glasses and a tasting sheet listing the wines we would be tasting and allowing space for them to take notes and rate them. Kris and I own a fair number of wine glasses, but at six-per-person, we had to make this a partial BYOGlasses event. In terms of the rating system, I wanted to keep this fairly straight-forward so used what many are now familiar with - the Netflix rating system: 5 stars Loved It, 4 stars Really Liked It, 3 stars Liked It, 2 stars Didn't Like It, 1 star Hated It.

The Tasting
So how'd it all work out? I must say, I was quite pleased with the results - not only did all of the wines rock in my mind (with the exception of the Chilean Pinot, which was just "OK"), but I was totally getting the whole "body" thing after about 30 minutes or so! The "tongue memory" of wine body is slightly fading, and I'd love to do this sort of tasting one more time to really solidify it, but I think the Big Six is an excellent tasting to start training your palate, and really fun to boot!

I think I will follow up this post with a second one detailing exactly why the Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay (and I didn't even think I *liked* Chardonnay!), Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon rocked. But suffice it to say that I would rate them all as exhibiting Excellent Quality-to-Price Ratio (QPR).

So What's Next?
Having had so much fun with the Big Six, I am already looking forward to the next of Andrea Robinson's recommended tastings. This next tasting involves 8 bottles, and is designed to help illustrate exactly what is meant by the tasting terms "dry", "crisp", "oaky" and "tannic". You pit a Dry Riesling vs. a Sweet Riesling, a Crisp, High-Acid Sauvignon Blanc vs. a Low-Acid Sauvignon Blanc, a "No-Oak" Chardonnay vs. an Oaky Chardonnay, and a Low-tannin Pinot Noir vs. a High-tannin Cabernet Sauvignon. This grouping seems a little more intuitive to me, as I think you pick up these terms while tasting easier than you may with wine body. But I trust Andrea's advice, and figure it's just too much fun to skip a recommended tasting! I'll let ya know how it turns out...

2004 Cousiño-Macul Doña Isidora Riesling

I decided a couple months ago or so that I wanted to learn more about Rieslings. It was actually some of the sweeter, German -style Rieslings that really got me started on wine in the first place several years ago. I think as I learned more about different wines and transformed into a red wine drinker, I just unconsciously presumed the stuff I started on had to have been inferior, and I have sort of ignored it ever since.

Well, a couple weeks ago I started reading Andrea Immer Robinson's Great Wine Made Simple. As described by the subtitle of her book, Straight Talk from a Master Sommelier, Andrea Immer Robinson really knows her stuff and is completely unpretentious as she walks you through a series of several recommended tastings meant to help you develop your palate.

The first of these tastings is the "Big Six" - six grapes that represent the "guts" of about 80% of the quality wine sold in the U.S. There are three white grapes and three red grapes, each grape also representing the range of body (light, medium and full) of each type. In order of increasing body, the white grapes are Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay; the red grapes are Pinot Noir, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.

When I read that, I thought"Hmmm... I've had several wines made from all but one of those grapes within the last couple of years - Riesling. Am I missing out here?" As Robinson says, "First, ditch your snobbery about Riesling. A lot of people hear Riesling and think 'sweet' and 'no thanks.' My theory is that as soon as people spot the traditional long, thin bottle, they have flashbacks to Liebfraumilch. But about the only thing great Rieslings have in common with Liebfraumilch is its traditional home base - Germany."

See, I told you she was unpretentious.

Anyway, that right there was enough to convince me that I needed to widen the (admittedly limited) horizons of my white wine world, and start tasting some Rieslings. With the hot and humid DC summers just right around the corner, when drinking my favorite red wines becomes all but unbearable, now seemed like the perfect time to start my exploration. So I did something I don't normally do - I bought this bottle of wine from the cornerstore "beermart" while picking up some Cinco de Mayo cervezas.

Why You Shouldn't Buy Wine at a "BeerMart"
This was probably a mistake for several reasons, but the biggest one was how the wine had been stored. Being mainly a beer store, they have tons of beer-filled refrigerators which noisily and continuously remove heat from within the coolers and pump it out into the store. I'm just taking a guess here, but this heating effect probably keeps the temperature in this small shop in the upper 70s - not exactly ideal storage conditions for wine. Also, being mainly a beer store, they a) had a very poor wine selection, and b) almost never sold any wine - thus the bottles they did have had probably stewed there on those shelves for some time without being replaced by new stock.

All of this is to say that I probably didn't exactly "set myself up for success" for my re-entry into the world of Riesling. And when I first cracked open this 2004 Cousiño-Macul "Doña Isidora" Chilean Riesling, I must say I was not impressed. Since Kris and I had folks coming over to our place for a Cinco de Mayo BBQ, I didn't have adequate time to chill the wine and attempted the "bottle in the freezer" trick which never seems to work out well. It was still far too warm when I first opened it, and therefore quite harsh. It was creamier than I was expecting, and had a bitterness to the finish which was not particularly pleasant. Oh well - time for a Negra Modelo, and the Riesling was pumped and put into the fridge.

The next night, my wife and I were having a grilled lemon pepper (wild-caught) salmon, so I figured I'd break it out and try it again. Having been in the fridge all day, it would now be at a much more agreeable temperature which I hoped would rectify the many faults from my previous failed tasting attempt.

Wine in Chile
But first, let me tell you a bit about Cousiño-Macul. C-M grows the grapes used for their Riesling in the Maipo Valley of Chile. Chile is in some ways the world's most ideal location for making consistent wines. Sandwiched by the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, it is protected from many of the pests that plague other vineyards of the world, most notably Phylloxera. Phylloxera attacks the roots of the Vitis vinifera vine, and completely decimated the world's wine grape vines in the late 1800s. It was only by grafting Vitis vinifera to native American Vitis labrusca rootstock, which was resistant to Phylloxera, that the wine industry was finally able to recover. But Phylloxera never made it down to Chile, and thus grapes in this region are mostly pure, ungrafted Vitis vinifera.

Another advantage that Chile's winemaking regions have in terms of making consistent wines is that they are very arid (receiving less than 12 inches of rain per year), relying upon irrigation. Thus heavy rainfalls late in the season can't "dilute" the ripening grapes which typically makes for thinner wine. Simultaneously, these arid regions are virtually immune from drought as snow melt from the Andes provides a plentiful source for their irrigation.

Now, on to the wine
We selected this wine-on-a-whim because we have thoroughly enjoyed Cousiño-Macul's Antiguas Reservas Cabernet Sauvignon (although my favorite Chilean wine has been the Carmenère - more on Chilean Carmenères in a later post!) This 2004 Cousiño-Macul "Doña Isidora" Riesling had a syrupy golden-straw color to it. What surprised me about the taste of this Riesling is that although tart, there was also what I think of as creaminess to it. I was definitely not expecting to find that in a Riesling. This leads me to believe that perhaps I confuse body with creaminess, because the tasting notes on Cousiño-Macul's website indicate that there was no malolactic fermentation (a secondary fermentation that changes the tarter malic acids into softer, creamier lactic acids), no aging in oak, nothing that would impart that cream.

So I wasn't that happy with this Riesling as a sipping wine. However, it paired quite nicely with our salmon. It's citrusy, almost pineapple flavor with minerally finish cut through the oily fish very nicely, cleansing the palate. Purchased for just $9 at the beermart, I probably can't expect much more from it than that.

Final recommendation
The last Riesling I tasted was an Alsatian Riesling at the FineWine.com tasting in April. That one was really good, and probably set my expectations a little high for this significantly cheaper Chilean Riesling. Before that, I can't even remember the last time I had Riesling. Thus I have a very limited mental Riesling library with which to compare the Doña Isidora. All I can say is that the Chilean Riesling worked out OK with dinner, but was nothing spectacular. I'm still going to move ahead with my plan to try more Rieslings this summer, but would love to get some suggestions so that my next experience is a better one!

Footnote
Kris and I are going to be starting in on the "Great Wine Made Simple" suggested palate-developing tastings, beginning with the Big Six tasting in two weeks! I have a Domaine Trimbach Riesling from Alsace slated for that event - I'm hoping to go 2 for 2 on good Alsatian Rieslings! I'm excited to take a more directed approach to improving my palate, so I'll let you know how it goes!