Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

Take the STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL Acid Test now to find out the acid truth about wine, the whole world of taste, and to discover your own personal acid limit!

Some people clearly long for an acid-free world even more than they desire wealth, success, fame or hot sex. I sometimes bump into wine drinkers who imagine that if only the acid could be taken out of wines rich in natural grape acidity like Riesling, then the world would be safe for democracy, stocks would enjoy a continuous bull market and Elvis would rise from the dead. Dream on!

The fact is that without enough acid wine – not just Riesling, but all wines, white, red, rosé, dry or sweet – tastes bland and lifeless, instead of fresh and lively. In fact, the same applies to almost everything we eat and drink to some degree. On the other hand too much acidity obviously turns Riesling sour, no less than it does other anything else we eat or drink. The Big Questions for wine drinkers  is where does fresh end and sour begin, and at the other end of the scale where does fresh turn into bland?

Acidity, or occassionally its opposite alkalinity (for example Japanese ramen noodles), is a fundamental aspect of all taste experiences. Those suffering from acid-phobia often seek a simple rule that will enable them to avoid ever putting something sour into their mouths again. However, there’s no such thing, because the threshold between fresh and sour, no less than that between fresh and bland, is highly personal. They depend upon those key taste experiences that etched themselves into your sensual memory (which holds on to memories much more tightly than our intellectual memory does) and our everyday eating and drinking habits.

This is the reason why a particular wine which strikes one person as being too tart is pleasantly refreshing for someone else. Some acid-hounds are obsessed with the analytical acid content of Riesling wines – “wow, this one has 10 grams per liter acidity, that’s 1%!” I know a few who collect these numbers like other people do football results. Sorry guys, but you’re on the wrong track. Those numbers tell you zilch about how the wines actually taste.

The only number which gives a good idea of how tart or soft a wine tastes is the pH. Anything with a pH reading lower than 7 (neutral) is acidic, and the lower the figure the more intensely acid it is. A chemist can take a sub-7 pH reading and calculate the concentration of hydrogen ions, that is naked protons, present. The naked proton – add a single orbiting electron and you get a hydrogen atom – is the active part of all acids. I bring up all this science only to make it clear that I’m not pulling this stuff our of the air just to boost Riesling.

When you pick a wine to drink it’s really helpful to know how much acid you really enjoy. That’s why I developed the STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL Acid Test. It’s based on FDA pH data for foods and beverages plus a bunch of figures for various wines which I collected over the years (thank you to all those winemakers who were open with their figures). It enables you to quickly and easily determine what your personal acid limit really is.

Start by looking at the list of drinks, fruits and other foods in category 1 and if you regularly consume one or more of them note that fact, then move onto to the next category and so forth. The highest category in which you find at least one food or beverage you often enjoy consuming is listed is your personal acid limit.

1 – milk, butter, cream, eggs

2 – black tea

3 – bananas, watermelon, bread

4 – figs, most beers, black coffee

5 – tomatoes, cherries

Also cool climate red wines from very ripe vintages

most warm-climate red wines

i.e. very many “Parker wines”

6 – apricots, pears, honey, green olives, bourbon, rum

also high-end Alsace Rieslings

many warm climate dry white wines

most cool climate red wines

i.e. some “Parker wines”

7 – orange juice, pineapples, strawberries, raspberries, peaches, most jams, wheat beer, rye whiskey

also most dry Rieslings from Germany, Austria, Alsace, California

most cool climate dry white wines including elegant Chardonnays

most branded sparkling wines and Champagnes

i.e. few “Parker wines”

8 – grapefruit, blackcurrants, gooseberries, orange marmelade, apple cider

also most sweet German Rieslings, particularly those from the Mosel, Nahe, Rhine

sweet and dry Rieslings from the Finger Lakes, Michigan, Oregon, Ontario, BC,

dry and sweet Rieslings from New Zealand, dry Australian Rieslings

most high-end Champagnes

i.e. few “Parker Wines”

9 – lemons, cranberry sauce, most vinegars, soda, cola

10 – limes, balsamic vinegar

Many people who take the Acid Test are seriously shocked to find that they score 9, because they drink soda and/or cola with pleasure. Often they don’t think of themselves as actively seeking acidic flavours and sometimes they describe themselves as either being sensitive to acid or actively avoiding anything tart. Almost everyone makes it to 7, because of orange juice. These beverages are perfect examples of how sweetness alters our perception of acid, making it seem pleasantly fresh rather than painfully sour. If it’s a hot day and you’re thirsty that magnifies this effect, which is a perfect example of how the situation exerts a major influence on our taste preferences.

This may come as a shock to some wine geeks and somms, but when it comes to the interplay of rather intense acidity (i.e. low pH) and sweetness there’s a fundamental similarity between soda/cola or orange juice on the one hand and those “classic” German Rieslings from the Mosel, Nahe and Rhine in category 8 with their crisp acidity and pronounced grape sweetness. None of these beverages taste that sweet to most of us, because their acid partly masks their sweetness. Anyone used to drinking soda or cola should therefore find the acid in those wines or the other sweet Rieslings in category 8 pleasantly refreshing.

In contrast, they might find the dry Rieslings in category 8 too tart. The reason for this is that they have almost no sweetness to clothe their abundant naked proton content. Only the minerals they contain (which taste slightly salty) help moderate their acids, and that’s why those minerals are so important to them. If often you like them then you’re definitely a bona fide acid-hound! But then anyone who scores 9 or 10 is also an acid-hound.

Also in category 8 are high end Champagnes, which also have very little sweetness. Their acids are balanced by the creaminess they gain through years of contact with the lees (dead yeast) in the bottle. As those yeast cells slowly break down they release proteins which create that creamy impression. No less than the the dry Rieslings in the same category, high-end Champagnes have a special taste which you either love or you simply don’t go for.

At the other end of the scale there’s a clear link between less-pronounced acid and the type of wines which my colleague Robert Parker likes, the championing of which made him the world’s most influential wine critic. Clearly, when it comes to full-bodied red wines and heavy-weight whites a large group of consumers are seeking out this lack of acid. Often they refer to this as “ripeness”, but these wines generally also have is a slightly sweet taste, because they contain too little acid to mask the impression of sweetness that comes from their high alcoholic content.

An important last thought. Although the category to which each wine, beverage and food belongs to doesn’t change, people certainly do. Habit and familiarity play a huge role in shaping what we like to eat and drink. As anyone who can remember their first cup of espresso (very bitter) or their first piece of sushi (raw fish) knows it’s possible to change your eating and drinking habits radically.

Hey guys, I don’t want to make life uncomfortable for you, but there are some hard facts I think you need to face up to, because at the moment some of you are being cheated by the wine industry. Those of you who don’t worry what other people think because of the type of wine you drink don’t have anything to fear from what follows. And this story will be of absolutely no interest to those guys who never drink wine, because they consider it chick stuff. But for regular guys who worry about looking manly when drinking wine this is going to be a helter-skelter of revelations leading to a devastating Riesling conclusion!

The problem is that a lot of the wines you guys think are bold and dry are actually soft and sweet. Part 1 of this story (see below) began digging into this can of worms, but the response suggests to me the problem is way bigger than I feared. Most shocking of the comments I received was from Peter Webster and concerned the wines of the famous Domaine William Fevre in Chablis/Burgundy. Imagine the following situation. You’re a regular guy who’s invited a beautiful girl on a date to a fancy restaurant. She wants to drink white wine and you don’t want to send the wrong signals, so you order an expensive bottle of Grand Cru Chablis from a well known producer. Why? Because Chablis is widely regarded as one of the classic dry white wines of France – the Right Stuff ! – Grand Cru is the top tier of the classification of Chablis wines – only the best will do! – and in combination with the name of that well-known producer looks a cast iron guarantee of success – make the right impression at the right moment! However, in America that wine could taste sweeter than you expected, because that well-known producer does “special” bottlings with more sweetness for the US market according to the motto of “talk dry and sell sweet”. That’s an old motto in the wine industry, and many producers in winegrowing regions around Planet Wine make their wines according to it. Don’t get me wrong, as far as I can see there’s nothing criminal about that, nor does it have any kind of obvious health implications, but how would you feel if the girl tastes the wine, shoots you a devastating look, then leans over the table and demands, “what’s this sweet schlock?” Sex Machine? Tonight sure isn’t the Night!

Powerful reds are often assumed to be the foolproof route to a dry wine. Regular guys often assume that red wine is drier, bolder, firmer and has more grip than whites; the main reason guys who want to prove they’ve got something substantial in their trousers usually choose red over white. Their assumption is that the tannins which the wine extracted from the grape skins during fermentation will make a full-frontal assault on the palate. A guy who doesn’t just stand up to this, but relishes it thinks he’s demonstrated Rambo-like toughness. However, modern cellar technology for making red wine is often used with the goal of extracting less tannins than in the past, particularly the dry-tasting, mouth-puckering type of tannins. And they’re the only tannins capable of mounting a full-frontal assault on the drinker’s palate. The final straw for old-style red came a decade ago when Robert Parker, the American Guru of Wine Hedonism, slammed Californian wine legend Robert Mondavi for making reds that were too lean and dry. After this the number of reds with old-style dry tannins plummeted even further. That was also was when the addition of sweetness to “dry” reds became increasingly common and stuff like the ‘Mega-purple’ grape concentrate starting going into Fancy Reds with hefty price-tags as well as Critter Wines on supermarket shelves. The fact that no winemaker ever publicly admitted adding ‘Mega-purple’ to Fancy Reds tells you how much they fear being accused of using winemaking’s equivalent of botox to make mediocre wines taste way more expensive… Sex Machine? No way Jose!

So where on Planet Wine can regular guys find something that you have to be a Real Man to drink. The answer is what I call Bladerunner Rieslings. They are seriously dry and have an acidity you have to be marine-tough to handle, unless you’re already an acidhound who seeks out this kind of extreme sport wines. The high natural acidity content of these wines is dictated by the Riesling grape’s DNA and balancing it in bone-dry wines is such a challenge there ought to be a Nobel Prize for it. The winemakers who pull this off are the Jedi Knights of Riesling and top of the list is the man pictured below, Martin Tesch of the Tesch winery in Langenlonsheim/Nahe, Germany. His laser sword wine is called Riesling ‘Unplugged’ and its black label is as uncompromising as the knife-edge taste. Either you’re man enough to drink ‘Unplugged’ or you aren’t. All of the Tesch Rieslings – even the single vineyard wines with their brightly-colored screw-caps – are radical wines that reject the slightest hint of tutti-frutti. Which is the most challenging of them? Maybe the one from the Karthäuser vineyard bottled under a reddish-brown screw-cap. Lick that blade!

Tesch isn’t the only Riesling winemaker in Germany to go down the bone-dry. Hajo Becker of J.B. Becker in Walluf/Rheingau and Theresa Breuer of Georg Breuer in Rüdesheim/Rheingau, Franz and Karl-Heinz Wehrheim of the Dr. Wehrheim in Birkweiler/Pfalz and Hansjörg Rebholz of Rebholz in Siebeldingen/Pfalz are other excellent examples of winemakers with a long-term commitment to Bladerunner Riesling. And there are a bunch of rising-star ‘Jungwinzer’ or young winemakers like Tobias Knewitz of Knewitz in Appenheim/Rheinhessen and Christian Stahl of Winzerhof Stahl in Auernhofen/Franken following in their footsteps.

For rather different reasons many Australian Rieslings fall into the same category, being blessed with a much more challenging acidity than you would expect from the climatic stats. In recent years Australia’s image as a nation has been strongly shaped by its sportsmen and women, plus the surfers on its beaches. However, the truth is that it’s the most arid major landmass on the planet. Its Rieslings grow at the equivalent latitude to Casablanca, but the sunlight is yet more intense, since down in the Southern Hemisphere there’s less dust in the air to filter out the ultraviolet. Australia is home to the most poisonous snakes, spiders and jellyfish on the planet, and on those stunning beaches the danger of shark attack shouldn’t be taken lightly. The rapier-like drive of Australian Riesling and the lime aroma they all have to some degree are things you’ll either love or recoil from in shock. The must-taste wines in this style which you have to taste are the Polish Hill Riesling from Jeffrey Grosset in the Clare Valley/South Australia and the Isolation Ridge from Frankland Estate/Western Australia.

America too has Bladerunner Rieslings to offer, particularly some of the dry wines from the ravishingly beautiful Finger Lakes region where the Riesling acidity is sometimes seriously intense. My favorite wine of this kind is the dry Riesling from Sheldrake Point, which always packs a considerable minerally punch along with the acidity, and like all the other wines mentioned also has great ageing potential. If this stuff is just a tad too austere for you when it’s young, then you’ll probably find it much more appealing after time has smoothed off some of the sharp youthful edges. However, if you really are marine-tough when it comes to Riesling acidity and you need something yet more challenging, then I recommend Heron Hill or Ravines. Pass this test and you can claim to be a Real Man, but I’d say that you’re actually a Jedi Knight of Riesling. May the Force be with you!

There was a really interesting comment on this story by Doug Krenik which I reproduce in fall. I think  that I should point out that the above does not pretend to be apply to the more than 150 million Americans who are male, but tries to describe a widespread tendency amongst them with deft wit or something appraoching it. I’m sure that Doug is right and find this a very encouraging development. It may well mean that the Riesling Spirit is spreading faster than even I’d dared to hope:

“Stuart, I think you’re missing an important part of what was going on here as this was obviously a well-heeled crowd and likely a little older. To the affluent, male, post 40′ish crowd, red wine is the only quality wine and they wouldn’t be caught dead drinking any white swill, if they can avoid it. And yes, if it’s sweet, then they had better grab a roll of duct tape and do a tuck that would make even Rupaul wince. Younger, male wine drinkers are consuming more white wines and, more importantly, not equating sweet with cheap as much as previous generations. Perhaps this, along with another generation of distance from Manifest Destiny and the American male stereotype, makes them not as threatened by the imagined penis whipping that will likely ensue when they consume a sweet beverage. I think the gender/sweet-wine thing, when applicable, goes beyond all American males and is more a generational, and perhaps socioeconomic, division.”

I guess that for most of you the city of Dresden in the ex-communist East of Germany is not one of the places you’d expect a delicious dry Riesling to grow. I guess that for most of you Dresden is rather the city whose center the Allies bombed with such terrible loss of civilian life in February 1945 (though many other German city centers were also bombed both before and after Dresden with similar results). “So it goes,” to quote Kurt Vonnegut on this subject in his famous novel ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’. I hope that many of you have heard about the rebuilding of Dresden’s historic monuments, most recently and spectacularly the gigantic Frauenkirche which literally rose again from a pile rubble. Much less well known is that fact that this part of the Elbe Valley in the state of Sachsen, or Saxony has a long winegrowing tradition.

OK, but dry Riesling way up at 51° North in the city’s suburb of Pillnitz? Surely that’s just too far north? Then there’s the legacy of the communist period with its forced collectivization of land, planned economy and chronic shortages of materials. Surely that’s just too far east? When the first good dry wines were produced in the ex-East Germany during the 1990s they were from Silvaner, Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc), Grauburgunder (Pinot Gris) and Traminer/Gewürztraminer; grapes that are naturally moderate to low in acidity content. On the basis of the wines I tasted back then my guess was that Riesling give in years with a warm summer Riesling could give good wines, but never a great one.

Klaus Zimmerling, seen above with his wife the Polish sculptor Malgorzata Chodakowska at the celebration of his 20^th anniversary as a commercial wine producer cleared his first ancient vineyard terraces to replant them 25 years ago. We’re talking about removing large trees, since those terraces had been out of cultivation for several generation. Even before 1945 the wine region of Sachsen had been in trouble. Since it was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Zimmerling and his friends undertook that work without a tractor or a chain saw! The fruit wines he made before he was growing his own grapes served as payment.

Zimmerling was convinced about Riesling’s future in the region from early on, and since making his first full-bodied dry Riesling in 2000 he has replanted more ancient terraces, built an amazing new cellar (see www.weingut-zimmerling.de), and refined his winemaking methods ever further. For example, today he presses everything using modern Italian-made basket presses. The fruit of this relentless toil is the superb range of dry and sweet white wines he made in the 2011 vintage.

For me the most remarkable of them is the 2011 Riesling ‘R’, because it’s the first world-class dry Riesling I’ve tasted from the ex-East Germany. It has the most enticing bouquet of perfectly ripe peach, though there’s still also a whiff of yeast; a sign of youth which suggests it will have a very long life. Graceful is the word which first comes to my mind when I think about the taste, but refinement and subtelty follow hot on its heels. No doubt others will go on about the wine’s minerality and it grew on rather similar soil to the “Urgestein”, or gneis, of the Wachau/Austria, so I’m not saying they’re wrong about that.

Zimmerling is a member of the elite VDP German producers association, but this wine couldn’t qualify for the VDP’s “Grosses Gewächs” (GG) category, because it has a fraction over the maximum sweetness allowed for GGs. If you’re very sensitive to sweetness you might pick that up, but most people won’t; certainly it accentuates the fruit on the palate and helped to keep the alcoholic content down to just 12.5%.

Every vintage since 1995 the label of Zimmerling wines have featured a different sculpture by his wife (see www.skulptur-chodakowska.de) on the label. The roof of Zimmerling’s new cellar features three of her bronze sculptures, the central one clearly being some kind of erotic fertility symbol. Part of the cellar’s interior also functions as an improvised gallery as shown below. Many recent pieces of her work seem to take that theme further. In Dresden astonishing new flowers are blossoming. So it goes.

Many people are still suffering from a deep-seated misconception about Riesling’s personality, though it’s several years since Randall Grahm, then owner of the Riesling-focused Pacific Rim winery in Washington State, said the following oft-quoted words:

“I am Riesling, a lioness, the Queen of the Jungle, hear me roar! Riesling is constantly misunderstood as a wine for pussycats, but it is in fact a very big, powerful beast.”

I’ve been thinking about them a lot since talking to Brian Harlan, National Sales Manager of Loosen Bros., sole US importers of the wines of Dr. Loosen, Robert Weil, Maximin Grünhaus and others. Brian’s a very funny guy, but this time what he told me was also dead serious. It was all about a Loosen Bros. event in a fancy restaurant where he was staggered by the chasm separating the reactions of male and female guests. Whereas the women were open to trying Riesling, even if it was sweet, all the men then felt cornered.

“When they saw we had no red wine first they asked for Chardonnay, then Sauvignon Blanc. When they heard it was either Riesling or Riesling they wouldn’t buy it unless was dry,” Brian said, adding that when confronted with the sweetness in some of the wines he was pouring the men, “were terrified by it!” It sounded as if they were frightened of being infected by some terrible and highly contagious disease. Of course, we’re talking about regular guys unaware of the Riesling Somm-Sation, of how for many sommeliers Riesling is the sexiest white grape on Planet Wine.

No doubt many of those guys heap spoonfuls of sugar into their coffee and frequently drink colas and sods which are sweeter than the sweet German Rieslings they so vehemently rejected at the Loosen Bros. event! Some of them undoubtedly also drink branded wines which look like they’re dry, but actually contain some sweetness, like the hugely popular  [yellow tail] from Australia. The supposed dryness of many full-bodied Californian reds and white Chardonnays is also illusory, since their high alcoholic content, low acidity levels and the generous use of oak during their aging makes them smell and taste sweet, even if they’re analytically dry. Even some high-end Californian reds are not even dry in that sense, a dash of syrupy-sweet, deeply-coloured grape juice concentrate called ‘Mega-purple’ having been added to them before bottling to smooth off rough edges and pep up the color. Your refreshing Stop on the Road to Nowhere.

What interests me here though is the sharp divide between the sexs. I think the root of the problem lies in the need many American men clearly feel to publicly demonstrate their masculinity. The dominant female stereotype in America may be as rigid as the male one, but it doesn’t seem to put women under that continual pressure to perform. Are men motivated by the fear of being taken for homosexuals, or the danger of being considered girly-men? Possibly the former, certainly the latter.

Just think about how John Kerry lost the 2004 presidential election, because George W. Bush managed to create the perception of him as an unmanly “flip-flopper” and nurtured the vague, but insidious impression that his opponent was a girly-man. Kerry did loads of manly stuff like wind-surfing for the TV cameras, but he couldn’t shake off that impression. Post 9/11 it was fatal to his chances. Of course, this turned into a boomerang for Bush whose abject failure to “smoke out” Bin Laden as he promised to do in true Wild West style now makes his manliness look seriously suspect.

American myth portrays the nation as having been founded by predominantly male pioneers who braved a sparsely-populated wilderness in order to civilize it. The heroic image of the cowboy in the Wild West myth, likewise set against a vast and almost empty backdrop with just a few Indians riding in the distance to provide some tension, is the next layer of this myth whose basis in fact is shaky at best. Of course, Hollywood Westerns, particularly those staring legendary actors like John Wayne, James Stewart and Clint Eastwood are largely responsible for the cowboy’s grip on the male psyche. Clint is doubly important here, because of his other role as the archetypal urban cop Dirty Harry whose “go ahead, make my day!” is another crucial element defining modern American masculinity. Being a successful businessman is often portrayed in the media as requiring a similarly hard-nosed approach. High-profile sports like football and hockey keep piling the pressure on American men to act tough, or at least avoid doing anything that might look even vaguely girly. All this and a lot more is behind the guys who not only do all the stereotypical male stuff, but also have penis-extensions and take testosterone.

Clearly though you don’t have to be the Ultimate American Guy to feel under massive pressure to demonstrate that you’ve got something in your trousers. Riesling is still widely perceived by both sexs as a sweet wine, because for a long time in America it almost always was. Sweet wine is likewise still perceived by most regular guys as a girly thing, which could, however slightly and fleetingly, cast doubt upon their masculinity; “fatal”!!! That’s why for them the only safe Riesling-scenario is a dry one, though it’s barely acceptable compared with the unmistakable signal of full-throttle-masculinity which a full-bodied red or a big Chardonnay would send: testosterone!!! And for them the worse-case scenario would be sweet Riesling, because that would make them look estrogen-effeminate pussycats.

By the way, after that event Brian Harlan immediately decided to change the labeling of all the dry Dr. Loosen wines imported into the US. Now they all bear a small oval neck label saying DRY. The IRF (International Riesling Foundation, see www.drinkriesling.com) graphic indicating the degree of dryness on the back-labels of millions of bottles of Riesling has undeniably helped push their sales, precisely because it helps remove insecurity about the level of sweetness.These days good quality sweet Rieslings almost always declare their sweetness on the label with designations like Late Harvest, Spätlese, Vendange Tardive and/or the IRF graphic. More importantly, the sweetness of good quality Rieslings is natural, i.e. has not been added in the winery. And from personal experience I can report that the consumption of good quality sweet Riesling doesn’t cause a decline in male potency, in fact rather the opposite!

A man must go where a Man must go! Watch this space for Part 2 coming shortly.

PS Yes, that is my leg and boot in the photo. The piece of dirt underneath my foot is in one of Jeffrey Grossets Riesling vineyards in Clare Valley/South Australia. His wines feature in Part 2 along with many other Bladerunner Rieslings for Real Men.

Peter Webster made an important comment about how far the trend towards  sweet wines pretending to be dry has gone. Chablis in Burgundy/France is supposed to be one of the ultimate dry white wines and William Fevre is one of the top producers:

“Stuart, it was interesting to me discover at a recent trip to burgundy that William Fevre do a seperate batch of grand cru chablis, specifically for the USA market with much higher residual sugar!  Presumably, this us to cater to the “baby taste” of the USA consumers. Just my 2 cents…”

I’d call that BAD NEWS for Burgundy, France, Grand Cru and Chardonnay. No wonder Riesling is doing so well if shit of this kind is going down elsewhere!

Nothing excites me like new wines do and I have to tell you about one of the most exciting new Rieslings I’ve tasted in a long time. In Riesling Think Piece Nr.4: Crazy Riesling Stats (Part 2) I described how Gina Haverstock, the winemaker of Gaspereau Vineyards close to Wolfvile/Nova Scotia (www.gaspereauwine.com), had run down the fact that there are now 10 acres (4 hectares)  of Riesling in her province of Canada. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but it struck me as pretty astounding, because it was 10 acres more than I was expecting! Then a bottle of the Gaspereau Vineyards 2011 Black Dogs Riesling arrived at my Berlin home by a circuitous route. Tasting it took me quite some time, because I wanted to try it with some other North American Rieslings and I had to wait for them to arrive. Then I wanted to see how it would develop if I left the open bottle (screwed shut) in the refrigerator for some days.

Freshly opened it was intensely citrusy – lemon pie, lemon curd, lime zest – but the bouquet was still really subtle and delicate. I know that sounds like a non-sequitor, no less than saying that it tasted really juicy, yet was also pristine. The hint of sweetness seemed to make it more lively than it would have tasted if it had been bone dry. That all adds up to the fact that I’ve never tasted anything quite like this wine before, and I’ve been tasting Riesling intensively for 30 years.  A couple of days later it seemed a bit closed-up, the acidity pretty challenging even for this acid-hound, so I left it alone for another full week in the refrigerator; enough to kill off all tpretenders on Planet Wine. Then came the real shocker: after it had been open for a total of 9 days it was almost as fresh as the moment I first opened the bottle, but had mellowed beautifully. Wow!

As I drank the rest of it I realized that this wine puts another piece in the puzzle of North America’s Rieslings I’ve been piecing together during the last weeks in the series of articles below,  see the various parts of Crazy Riesling Stats and State of the Union. But first have a look at the map or Google Earth to see where this wine grows. It is way further north (45°) than I ever imagined Riesling could work on the Eastern Seaboard of America. If it grows and ripens well at Gaspereau Vineyards, then there must be a bunch of other places in Nova Scotia and in the neighboring Canadian provinces and American states where it will also grow and ripen. My guess is that within a few years the world map of Riesling will have to be redrawn. Thank you Gina for a great Riesling, a great Canadian wine and for the inspiration!