My wife know less than I do about wine, which isn’t very much. I said “what are your thoughts on Riesling”? She says “I don’t like Riesling”. Case closed .
P.S. She can’t drink red wine, so I will probably get a Riesling for her birth year wine for her 50th later this year.
Let’s not forget Mateus Rose!
My take:
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Riesling isn’t trendy among the masses. Merlot is or was; sauvignon had its day. Pinot was shunned until Sideways. It’s been hot since then.
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Hence, most consumers have little experience with riesling in any form.
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Americans say they like dry, so they shun wines they are warned are sweet.
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Meanwhile, riesling has developed a much more serious following among serious wine folks over the past 20 years.
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#3 is huge, but Americans (in general not Berserkers…,) crave sugar. They just don’t want to admit it.
4 is super true, but is a niche audience.
I love Riesling, but would never advise anyone to plant it. Ever.
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Peanut stew? WTF?
I just wish our numerous Thai restaurants would get more serious about wine. Most of them when I ask for a wine list they just say that have the Ste. Michelle Riesling. It would be a nice to have a few more selections as Riesling is a great pairing with spicy Thai food. We used to go (PreCovid) to Wild Ginger in Downtown Seattle not for the food (it was ok but nothing special) but for the 20 page list of German Rieslings they would sell at reasonable prices and the staff there treated us like VIPs.
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No, you make wonderful dry domestic Gewurz. There is a difference.
Usually an African dish, not sure which exact region. But peanut sauce or soup is the only absolute wine killer I know of. Nothing is good with it.
linked below
typically I would say Sarah is right. but I did think the drier Bedrock riesling did a pretty good job.
I should add that my version of the dish is in no way authentic. a real peanut stew (which I am confident Sarah makes better than I do) may indeed be much worse for pairing with wine than my version. lol
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Now, that I wouldn’t drink. But I started on Ripple “Pagan Pink”!
My wife and I drink a fair amount of riesling, and every time we offer it up for non-wine people, they look askance at it. If I give choices, it never gets picked. If I serve it, I do get a lot of “I’m surprised -this is really good” commentary.
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Same. A couple of the guys in our monthly tasting group are always impressed by the rieslings I open because they are so different than what they expected. And they are always the first bottles finished.
Looking at your offers, it is clear to me why they sell out. They are hip and cool, drawing in new people, and no one would confuse those wines with the plonk of yesteryear. The personal stories about transformative up & coming vintners. The food and music tie in, and the community built around studying a new exciting experience. I’m confident this would work with the top domestic producers as well.
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Remember that the word dry in the minds and vocabularies of most wine wannabes in the US has no meaning beyond “a wine I like.” They use it without the slightest notion of how dry or sweet or fruity the wine actually is; it’s just the term of choice when they like the wine. If they ask for a drier wine at a bar, it generally means “something I enjoy more,” but is the only word they have.
Understanding this, the flipside is that a “sweet” wine is, by definition, a wine I don’t like.
When words stop having real meaning, communicating gets tough.
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I seem to recall a domestic offer earlier in the year (Desire Lines). Was that one as popular as the other ones?
Interesting discussion. Over the past few decades Riesling has gone from about 10% of my wine consumption to about 1%. The main reason is that it seems to be impossible to make my favorite Rieslings any more. A year or two back, I posted about what I used to like and what I’m looking for. Nobody replied. I am pretty sure it doesn’t exist, which is a shame because I enjoyed it enormously for almost half a century:
Please give me a Saar Riesling Kabinett with ~7% alcohol, ~1% RS, almost if not 1% TA, pH barely 3. I will happily accept substitutes from anywhere in the world that can reproduce that profile. Adam? Anyone? Is it being planted in Scandinavia yet?
Meanwhile, I am sorry Adam, but you are indeed swimming upstream through molasses. As others have noted, there just isn’t any ‘geek appeal’ to California Riesling. OTOH, New York’s Finger Lakes have really begun to develop a following. By coincidence, Eric Asimov’s New York Times wine column today was '10 New York State wines to Drink Now. Yes, two of them were Finger Lake Rieslings, both dry. Not cheap ones, at $28 and $37! I haven’t done a poll or seen any statistics, but I can tell you that before COVID, Finger Lakes Riesling was quite common on good NY restaurant wine lists, both in the city and upstate, often by the glass. It is also obviously for sale in any good NY wine shop, and not hidden on a dusty bottom shelf.
Dan Kravitz
My father-in-law lives in Buffalo, NY. He is not at all a wine geek, yet somehow came to casually fall in love with German Rieslings back in the 1970s. He recalls that they were very cheap and his favorite was JJ Prüm. He doesn’t drink much now, but really likes the occasional Finger Lake Riesling.
Pre-Covid, I hosted a couple of non-wine geek friends. The first was thrilled when I opened a Barolo. The second looked embarrassed and said he prefers sweet wines. He was delighted when I opened a Brooks Riesling from Oregon.
My point is merely that there are people out there who are happy to drink Riesling, even sweet versions. But neither of these people are going to walk into a store and choose Adam’s Riesling off the shelf. Maybe his only market will be Berserker Day.
I’m curious: how do you deal with French onion soup? IMO, there is one, and only one, answer; interested to see if it’s yours.
Thank for this thoughtful discussion - so much to take in!
I think you’re right on the money here. There is obviously a resistance already to R, and domestic versions of it have an even more of a barrier, especilaly when they’re in same price segment. We’ve had some long history of Bordeaux and Burgundy varietals here and it feels like the US consumer today will happily buy either French or domestic. But that’s obviously not the case with R. I’m assuming that can only come with critical mass, which seems a long way away.
I get a very casual feeling that Riesling in Germany is on the uptick. This might have to do with them making their quality improvements and having had their producers get together and unify.
The other day I saw this clip of Saar’s Von Volxem’s grand opening of their new winery/tasting room. I mean, it’s a huge, architectural flashy thing that would almost put Opus One’s building to shame. Must have cost millions and millions to build. Obviously, Roman Niewodniczansky wouldn’t be able to do that had he not had sales that can pay for it (although I do hear he comes from a rich family). Take a look, it’s stunning:
That’s what I’m realizing. It is clear that DTC to those who are already into the variety, is the best way forward at this stage. No point in trying to fight a two-fronted war at retail. Even the distributors I’ve been talking to have said as much - the reps often go “I love Riesling, but it’s not a big seller”.
Look forward to that! You’re doing great work with the variety!
The Finger Lakes are starting to get a name for themselves. But I see that as a great thing a sit will just help elevate interest Riesling. If they find a FL they like, then maybe the step over to a CA will go a little easier in the future?
It would be great to hear from people like Graham Tatomer and other about their Riesling experiences. I know Tatomer just released a Pinot, so maybe that was out of a need to have a SKU that can sell more easily?
Todd Hamina - you just had a Riesling blowout - what has been your experience over the years or in your tasting room?
Riesling is hard.
Even going the DTC route, most of the people who will get excited about my Chardonnays do so partly because white Burgundy is expensive.
With the Riesling, I can sell it locally and people really enjoy it, but a lot of my mailing list have cellars loaded with excellent German producers whose wines are very, very affordable.
My solution was to make 50 cases for my own piece of mind(and soul), and then not worry about whether it sells or not. But that’s not helpful for someone looking to pay rent with Riesling.
I watched two producers in Oregon who were making great Riesling(IMO) at the time just walk away from making Riesling because they were doing great work and killing themselves to sell it.
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