White wines reviewed by the Wine Rambler:
This is our second wine from the supermarket wine category. After the Liebfraumilch, it only could get better. And it did. At first, I was not really impressed. Drinkable, but not too much in the nose or mouth, apart from a little lemon. With a little bit of air, this wine did improve a lot.
So here we are. The infamous, dreaded Liebfraumilch. One day it had to happen. And that day is now. In the really olden days, Liebfraumilch (beloved Lady's milk) was a label for low yield, high quality wines from the city of Worms (Rheinhessen). It was a highly sought after example of German wine making.
Now it can be put on pretty much any vaguely sweet wine from the Rheinhessen area of Germany that is made from grape varieties such as Riesling or, mostly, Müller-Thurgau. Sweet, cheap (£2.82 in this instance) and not very cheerful, these wines do now represent German wine in the UK - at least for a majority of customers. So it seemed the logical choice to turn to Liebfraumilch for the first wine in what may become a regular Wine Rambler category: supermarket wine.
Straw-coloured, on the lighter side.
Ripe apricots and other ripe yellow fruit, rich, some perfumy citrus aromas as well.
Very young and fruit-driven in the mouth, nice acidity, peach and grapefruit notes sprayed onto a creamy body.
This is very much a "made" wine (think cultured yeasts, think low temperature fermentation) and although it has substance, polish and even some spice, it could have been made in South Africa, in Friuli, or some other place where very good winemakers know exactly how their wine should taste in the end. Nothing wrong with that, but it didn't work for me just now. I can't rule out that this might have turned into something with more depth and a sense of place with some bottle ageing. Who knows?
I really appreciate how a good sommelier can make an excellent dinner even more memorable. At a previous (and dare I say excellent) dining experience at Tom Aikens the sommelier recommended Rémy Gresser's Brandhof Muscat with fish.
While searching for a UK source for this wine I learned that I am apparently gifted with a special understanding of this kind of wine (or perhaps wine in general), as the wine merchant wrote to me: "The Muscat is essentially a restaurant wine, very few people understand dry Muscat, like you."
So far wines from the Van Volxem winery have not let us down, so when I came across a bottle of the 2005 Riesling from the Saar river at my favourite Battersea wine merchant last year (the notes are from September) I had to take it home with me.
A wine of shiny golden colour and a nice nose of mineral, smoothed over with caramel-plum and herbs, with the addition of a little petrol. In the mouth, a rich, almost saturated experience, a Riesling with some complexity and also well rounded.
Very dark straw colour, a tinge of gold
Smells of peaches and pineapples pickled in petroleum (there's German white wine for you...), marzipan, dried herbs, and smoke. Reminded me somewhat of the more powerful Grüne Veltliners.
Great density and an oily, liqueurish mouth-feel, some maturity (camomile tea, bread), but most of all great smoky minerality. The finish of dried peaches, smoke and salted almonds is long and intense.
Light, clean colour. Just seconds after the cork comes out of the bottle, your nose tells you that this (dry) wine is a little different from the sweet Haarts. The mineral is more steely, focused, with light melon, fresh acidity, less herbs than usual.
If you ever wanted to know what a toad puddle (=Krötenpfuhl) tastes like, here comes one. Well, it is not as muddy as you may now think, but Krötenpfuhl is the name of the vineyard on which the grapes for this late harvest Riesling were grown my one of the grand wizards of German Riesling.
Starting with a taste that was a little bitter, this greatly named wine soon developed into something really yummy. Delicate colour; a somewhat delicate nose that combines mineral with a little bit of lemon and apple. Certainly not an immediate in-your-face fruit explosion, but still with the promise of several layers of taste.
A good food companion, this wine combines flinty mineral and green apple with a little hay, spice and nut. A nice dosage of acidity adds to the freshness but also introduces some bitter notes to this otherwise nicely balanced wine. Very pleasant with food (asparagus and fish in our case).
Half bottle Rieslings are very tempting. Not because getting half the amount of wine is exciting as such, but because these small bottles often contain some of the highest quality drops of sweet molten gold. A three star Auslese ('selection') wine from top Mosel winemaker Molitor would have to be a candidate for a top quality sweet wine. Or is it?
