What is RIESLING - Everything you need to know about this popular German grape.

Oh I love Riesling. Hi welcome to The Grape Explorer, I hope you're all safe and well. Today we are talking about Riesling, one of my absolute favourites and we're going to be going through a little bit about the history of this grape, where in the world you can find it, as well as some of the practices in the winery, some of the styles you can expect, as well as those all-important aromas. If you're new to the channel, welcome, I'm The Grape Explorer. Here we do wine education, product reviews and lots of wine tasting and so if that's your thing, consider subscribing. Yeah Riesling has been one of my favourites for years, there's something about the number of styles that it comes in, but I'm particularly drawn to those bone dry crisp styles that really leave you like you've been slapped on either side of the cheek with some incredibly intense acidity. So I wanted to go through Riesling today really because it could open a bottle and I could drink it after we're all done here. So let's go through a little bit about the history of Riesling. Well it was first documented in the 15th century in Germany, meaning that of course it had probably been planted and cultivated for a number of years before that. It was planted more extensively throughout the Rhine and Moselle from around the mid-16th century and it was documented in Alsace, France for the first time in 1628. During the 18th century in Germany plantings of Riesling were dramatically increased and this was almost by order of some of the hoi polloi at the time who wanted to get more of Riesling out into the public domain. One of the problems with this though was that at the time the practices of grape harvesting in Germany meant that a lot of the grapes were harvested quite late in the season and Riesling which can harvest quite early was not of the typical type of quality that people wanted to see and for a while Riesling actually fell away as one of the premier grapes in that country. Although of course now it's had a huge resurgence and it's funny when I think about Riesling from a UK perspective I actually think about some pretty terrible styles of wine that were exported to the UK in the 1980s and early 1990s and thankfully those days are over and of course today there is such a fantastic variety available to me. So bringing it back to today then where will you find Riesling around the globe? Well Germany still remains the world's biggest producer of Riesling in areas like the Mosel, the Rheingau, Pfalz. It's incredibly popular in France in Alsace although critically this is actually the only part of the country where this particular vine is allowed. Once Riesling started to spread out of Germany and into places like France as well as countries like Luxembourg, Switzerland and Austria it actually found a really great home in the Wachau in Austria where they are known for producing the country's best examples of Riesling. Further afield Australia has become a real hot spot for fantastic Rieslings around the Clare Valley and the Eden Valley areas and within the United States probably most notably in Washington State although also popularly found in New York State and California as well you'll find some fantastic expressions of Riesling. So when we're talking about Riesling as a grape variety how does it perform in the vineyard? Well Riesling is suitable for growing in cooler wine regions and I think when we talk about areas like the Mosel and the Rheingau in Germany they are particularly cool. So one of the beneficial elements of Riesling is that the vines show resistance to frost. It does have that propensity to ripen early in warmer regions although of course it is suitable for late harvesting in the right conditions and we'll come on to some of those other harvesting methods a little bit later on. Finally and again we will cover this later on it is susceptible to noble rot which means you're able to produce some particularly different styles of Riesling in the winery and it's in the winery where we start to express all of the different styles of Riesling that are of course available with different areas of the world producing it in different ways but Germany really specializing in a particularly sweet style of Riesling. Now the grape itself in the winery is incredibly versatile it produces wines of varying sugar levels or dry wines are going to be light bodied refreshingly fruity with high acidity and those sweeter wines while still retaining that acidity are going to be more medium bodied with lower levels of alcohol and the wines made out of the Riesling grape can age for decades and they are known to fetch some very high prices for those aged wines some going back at least over 100 years. So I mentioned a little bit there about the versatility of this particular grape and the fact that it can come in a number of styles dependent on the sugars present in the wine. That comes from a system in Germany called the Pradekatz vine system and it's all about measuring the sugar levels in the grape so I wanted to give you a little bit more information about some of those classifications you may see on your bottle of Riesling. So starting off with Cabernet which literally means cabinet it means fully ripened light wines from the main harvest and then we have Spätlaser which translates as late harvest this is where the grapes would have been picked around seven days after the normal harvest meaning that they are riper they will have higher sugar levels. Then you have Auslaser meaning select harvest and this is made from very ripe hand selected bunches of grapes. You then move on to Bierenauslaser which means select berry harvest made from overripe grapes individually selected from bunches. You then have the particularly long worded Trockenbierenauslaser meaning select dry berry harvest made from selected overripe and shriveled grapes. And then the final classification is Eiswein where the berries are left on the vines and are not harvested until the temperatures reach eight degrees centigrade or lower. So lots of different styles and that of course means that we go right through the spectrum on sweetness from those bone dry styles to those luscious styles that Eiswein becomes luscious and we're going right through the spectrum. Let's talk a little bit more then about some of those aroma characteristics you might expect from Riesling starting off with those drier styles from cool climates. Here you can expect things like green apple, grape as well as lime and I find particularly when it comes to those Aussie Rieslings they always have a huge smack of lime for me huge lime bomb type of wine absolutely fantastic style. Moving on to drier wines but in warmer climates you can sometimes get aromas of orange that's an apricot there and then that's an apricot flipped 180 degrees and recolored to be a nectarine. My drawing skills are slightly increasing week on week. Then we move on to those sweeter styles of Riesling and we can start to expect more at the tropical end of the fruit spectrum as well as things like honey. So honey, pineapple, mango are really good aroma notes that you might associate with a sweeter style of Riesling. But of course when it comes to Riesling we can't talk about the grape without talking about one specific aroma that is associated with it and that is the always unusual aroma of petrol. Now Riesling and the petrol aroma it can be described as kerosene, a lubricant or rubber. It's a primary aroma in Riesling. The characteristic, the aroma actually comes from the grape itself and it's caused by a chemical compound that I'm going to have a crack at saying here called 116 trimethyl 1,2-dihydronafethylene. Shall I try that again? No. Factors that are likely to increase the aroma are riper grapes, high sun exposure and water stress which is going to have concentrated the aromas in those berries. But this petrol aroma is often found in higher quality wine so it's not always present and actually you will tend to see that as wines age that aroma can sometimes become ever so more pronounced as that wine gets that little bit older. The wine that I've got today I decided to take a Riesling out of my wine rack, there's always a few in there, from Germany. This is from the Pfalz, this is Diedersheimer Riesling 2015 from Dr. Berkelin Wolf. 2015 so a little bit of aging on this one. Now I've actually only opened this one in the last half an hour to give it a chance to open and I've had a couple of sips from it and already actually I was starting to detect that that petrol aroma. The other things that are coming through on this one for me are it's really floral, it's a bit like fresh cut flowers. So the things that are overriding in this one are apple, that petrol aroma and then fresh cut flowers. Those are the three things that sort of were overriding for me. On the palate you know I don't have a wine fridge, I have a wine rack in the house so it's been sat there for about a few years now but the intensity of the acidity on this one is incredible. The flavour intensity is really high for me and that acidity is high as well. It is low in alcohol, a lot of the Rieslings are because of that cooler climate for where these are made. The sugars do not develop so much so the alcohol for this one is low. It is light bodied but it's got this fantastic, absolutely fantastic finish to it and it just brightens your palate. It's funny when I go to lots of wine tastings where perhaps you're tasting 50 to 60 wines in a day, I always go back to Riesling during the day as something to freshen me up again, get my palate zingy and restarted and fresh, ready to taste other wines. I just find it has such amazing qualities. You know it's so well balanced, the aromas, the flavours, it's got intensity in those aromas. It is not necessarily overly complex because I think all of the aromas are coming from the fruit but it's just got this fantastic ageing ability and this is one that I can drink today but I could probably sit it down for another five years, lay it down for five more years, open it and I'll find it even more developed, even more exciting. Problem is once I've opened it, it doesn't last that long. So I'm really going to enjoy this one for the rest of today and I hope you found this insight into Riesling useful, educational. Please let me know of any other grapes you'd like to see featured on the A to Z of Wine but for now I'll say see you all again soon. I'm the Grape Explorer. Cheers! Delicious!