White wines reviewed by the Wine Rambler:
When you put your nose into a glass of wine and it smells a little bit like a car dealership, but in a good way, you can be fairly certain that you have a Riesling in front of you. This Haart Riesling from the Mosel is not one of the petrol noses, so please don't think of a garage wit lots of oil and grease, but its bouquet has a little of the more refined version of that smell, just think of a BMW car dealership salesroom. Or rather walking through one while eating a peach.
At the Wine Rambler, we have this ongoing love affair with the Silvaner grape. Today's Silvaner comes from the German wine region of Franken, the spiritual home of this grape variety.
This is a textbook Silvaner in the best sense of the word. You get earthy, grassy notes, almost smoky. There is apple, refreshing in the nose and well defined on the tongue. At its core the Silvaner is robust, but smooth round the edges with notable minerality.
After all those German and Austrian Rieslings, we are now going Australia. Clearly, the Wine Rambler is no nationalist. What could be more Australian, apart from Paul 'Crocodile Dundee' Hogan perhaps, than a Riesling from Adelaide Hills? Well, actually, it is sort of German too - at least the winemaker is (no one would have guess from the name 'Egon Müller').
If it comes to the Salwey winery, we have so far mostly sampled their range of excellent Pinots - Noir, Gris/Grigio and Blanc. Located in the warmest area of Germany, the volcanic Kaiserstuhl in the South West, the Salwey vineyards are very well suited for growing Pinot. As it turns out, they also make good Riesling there, and I had one of them recently with a nice piece of fish and English asparagus.
Karthäuserhofberg. Nothing demonstrates the place vineyards occupy in german wine culture like wineries that are synonymous with the vineyards that surround them. This must put some pressure on the staff, must it not? If you work at a place called Karthäuserhof and produce wine from a site that has been called Karthäuserhofberg from time out of mind, you better not screw it up. Not to worry. They never do.
Recently, I found myself drinking with friends who were discussing which type of vegetable they would like to be. When I asked them how they would rate me, Charlotte suggested I could be a squash. Unfortunately I never really found out why she classified me in this way, partly because she went on to say she would quite like to be a courgette. Today's wine, luckily, is not like a vegetable. Instead it is very easy to describe in terms of fruit: take the most deliciously juicy peach you can imagine, add passion fruit, and caramelise it with lots of sugar and some gold, sprinkle finely with herbs and serve in a stony cup with a dash of menthol, spice and lemon juice. As you can see this description really does not work in relation to vegetables, but I can tell you that if this wine were a human being it would have to be the young Liv Tyler - just in blond.
With at least one Wine Rambler new year's resolution still unfulfilled, a sense of duty and self-discipline finally compelled me to open a Loire white. I also wanted to try one of the esoteric, hyper-regional french wines that the really knowledgeable cats like Cory Cartwright from Saignée are always on about. I had hoped for something original to broaden my wine horizon, but this Chenin Blanc from a legendary Vouvray producer turned out to be rather more - a real shock to the Riesling-saturated system.
These days, I find myself drinking more and more Weißburgunder (Pinot Blanc). It can be very food friendly (especially when you go for lighter food, fish and the seasonal asparagus (even though the latter is always a bit tricky)) and I enjoy the contrast to the sharper Riesling. A particularly good and typical recent example for Weißburgunder came from the Saar river, very close to the Mosel. It looked a little bit like this:
One of the less exciting things about living in London is not having a cellar. I sometimes feel a certain envy towards friends on the continent who 'of course' have a cellar and can put age-worthy wines away for a few years or even decades. So whenever I can get my hands on an aged wine I get pretty excited. Quality Riesling, particularly the sweeter ones, can age very well, but if you buy a twenty year old one it is always a gamble. Luckily, I got this one directly from the winery, so I was fairly certain it had been stored properly. Ladies and gentlemen, I present a good ol' boys Riesling from the Moselle:
Lime, peach, mineral, herbs, peach, lime, good acidity - I do actually feel a little sorry for using these words here over and over again. But what can I do, these German Rieslings are just very good at delivering that - and the 2008 dry Riesling from the Emrich-Schönleber winery is no exception. In fact, it is a good example for a dry, crisp and fresh wine of this type that also comes at a reasonable price (especially if you take into consideration that it comes from one of Germany's most prestigious wineries).
