Best White Wine on Earth: The Riesling Story

By Stuart Pigott

A celebrated wine journalist presents a comprehensive, entertaining primer on one of the most beloved wines of our time: Riesling.
 
Diverse, drinkable, aromatic, and refreshing, Riesling is a chameleon among white wines. From its food-friendly flavor and favorable price point to its ability to be either bone-dry or honey-sweet, there are very good reasons to argue that Riesling is not just a popular wine of the moment, but the finest white of our time.
 
In Best White Wine on Earth, wine journalist and Riesling enthusiast Stuart Pigott extols the virtues of his favorite varietal and explores the history behind this magnificent grape. Traveling to the great Riesling-producing regions of the world—from North America to Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America—Pigott provides tasting notes, top-rated recommendations, and fascinating insights into how the wine is made, all while making an impassioned case that it is, truly, the best white on earth.
 
Written simply enough for a novice, but with enough expertise and insight to satisfy the most sophisticated collector, this is a must-have guide for any white wine enthusiast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Jun 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781613126639

Book preview

— The Riesling Profile —

DATE OF BIRTH: Unknown, but the first documentary evidence is dated March 13, 1435.

PLACE OF BIRTH: Unknown, but the first documentary evidence is from Rüsselsheim, Germany (today the home of Opel Motors).

PARENTS: Obscure Heunisch (French: Gouais Blanc) grape and unknown offspring of the noble white Traminer (French: Savagnin) and unknown second grandparent. Heunisch gives thin, tart whites and Traminer rich, aromatic whites. So, Traminer married way beneath its station!

FAMILY: Closely related to a slew of other wine grapes, from white Chardonnay to red Gamay (which share Heunisch/Gouais Blanc as a parent) and from red Cabernet Sauvignon to white Grüner Veltliner (which share Traminer/Savagnin as a parent).

COLOR: White, but the grapes are actually green when unripe, then turn golden as they ripen.

SEX: In German the vine, die Rebe, just like the grape, die Traube, is female, and given that this grape hails from Germany, I’d say Riesling is also female.

PERSONALITY PROFILE: Often a joyful extrovert with hidden depths, Riesling sometimes has the Blade Runner steeliness of a secret agent or the in-your-face glamour of a vamp.

UPBRINGING: For centuries her abilities weren’t appreciated because she was lost in the crowd (i.e., when she was planted, she was mixed in with numerous other varieties, including some hobos).

SPECIAL TALENTS: Only the best perfumes come close to matching the bouquet of a great Riesling. And then there’s the taste, which is so alive in your mouth, so tantalizing and energizing, regardless of whether the wine is dry or sweet.

FIRST PUBLICATION: In the 1577 edition of Hieronymus Bock’s Kreütterbuch (Herbal) published in Strasbourg, France, Riesling is described as growing on the Rhine and Mosel.

FIRST RECOGNITION: In 1720–21, Schloss Johannisberg, in Germany’s Rheingau region, replanted all of its vineyards with Riesling (a total of 293,950 vines) and started a fashion for varietal plantings of the grape in the valleys of the Rhine and its tributaries.

FIRST BIG BREAKTHROUGH: The 1811 vintage Riesling from the Rheingau region became cult wines throughout Europe, then the whole world, with prices reflecting this until the mid-20th century.

PLACE OF RESIDENCE: This citizen of the wine world is widely planted on three continents and regularly consumed by millions on all five permanently inhabited continents.

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: After a long period as a single, the Cinderella of wine grapes is finally going to the ball, and we all know what happens then!

— The Riesling Backstory —

Sure, when I first hooked up with Riesling in London back in the early 1980s, the grape was beset with problems. Many of these problems were created in Germany, where the tradition for high-quality Riesling had recently been eclipsed by the mass production of sweetish wines with names as kitschy as their taste: Liebfraumilch, Goldener Oktober, etc. Often they contained little or no Riesling, but they eroded the image of German Riesling as an honest wine just the same. However, the worst problem was a motley crew of cheap and banal wines from a bunch of countries around the globe that were sold as Riesling although they were made from completely different grapes. Thankfully, that exploitation of Riesling’s good name has been eradicated through international agreements, and Riesling on the label now means Riesling in the bottle. Most of those kitschy German wines have also vanished from supermarket shelves as wine fashions changed.

As a young New Zealand winemaker recently said of those times, There was a temporary lapse of Riesling. However, even during that short Dark Age, there were some exciting dry and sweet Rieslings around, and that’s how I got hooked. Although I eagerly explored all the wines of the world, I kept coming back to Riesling for the seductive aromas and dazzling flavors. Even when Riesling is frankly sweet, those descriptors still apply, and its sweetness is as natural as those aromas. In contrast, the oak aromas of many red and some white wines have nothing to do with the grapes or the yeast, which means they’re not really natural.

Every story has a backstory, and Riesling’s fall from grace was preceded by a long period of global popularity and success. Because of the Eurocentric nature of much wine history, the work of pioneers like Joseph Gilbert, who first planted Riesling at his Pewsey Vale Vineyard in South Australia’s Eden Valley in 1847, is still underappreciated. That his Riesling was highly commended at the Universal Exposition of 1867 in Paris proved that Pewsey Vale was a very serious enterprise and that the world of wine was already beginning to globalize; a precursor of the contemporary Planet Riesling was already beginning to develop.

Back then there were no wine critics to send samples to for review. The medals and commendations handed out at world fairs and international expositions played a comparable role then that the numerical ratings of the most influential critics now play. For example, the rise of the German Mosel as a competitor to the Rheingau can be traced through its winegrowers’ participation at these high-profile events. At the 1862 International Exhibition London, a joint exhibit by a group of Mosel winemakers received an honorable mention, but just five years later in Paris a similar group exhibit landed a silver medal. At the Paris Exposition International in 1900, the Egon Müller estate of Wiltingen/Mosel dared to exhibit alone and picked up a Grand Prix, the equivalent of 100 points from a modern wine publication (which Egon Müller has also garnered). By then the Mosel had already overtaken the Rheingau in popular esteem in Germany and internationally and was widely regarded as the most desirable white wine, period.

Today the Chinese wine industry is just beginning to experiment with producing Riesling again. But back in 1915, a Riesling from the Changyu winery of Yantai in Shandong Province won a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In total, Changyu won four gold medals there, which was a big deal when you consider that it was founded in 1892 and was a pioneer. Founder Chang Bishi’s long journey to San Francisco to participate was therefore well worth the effort; he was the wealthiest man in Asia, so the cost was no problem for him.

Wine production has been fairly well covered by historians, particularly where detailed records have been preserved. However, the history of wine consumption is often as much a black box for historians as contemporary wine consumption is for journalists today. Modern prejudices get projected on the past, including the one that the pre-prohibition American wine culture and industry were primitive. In fact, both were highly innovative, and Riesling was a high-status wine.

For example, on March 19, 1915, the organizers of that Panama-Pacific International Exposition invited members of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to a banquet to thank them for their support. With the terrapin à la Maryland and roasted stuffed squab, they served a Riesling from Mount Hamilton, south of the city. At this time, Californian Riesling was invariably one of the most expensive still wines on the menus of West Coast restaurants.

After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Riesling’s stock rose again, as menu cards, wine lists, and books of the period prove. Even World War II did no more than interrupt this process. For example, when the 1,100-room Shamrock Hotel opened in Houston, Texas, in 1949, by far the most expensive bottle of wine on its list (see this page), at $40, was a 1921 Riesling from Schloss Johannisberg in the Rheingau. Although we don’t know what the 3,000 guests—including Ginger Rogers, Dorothy Lamour, and Errol Flynn—drank at the opening of the Shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day 1949, we do know that the NBC nationwide live radio broadcast was cut off for 20 seconds when an engineer who assumed he was off-air uttered the f-word when describing the chaotic scenes in the hotel. However, we can also be pretty sure that neither those stars nor the local people who created what the Houston Chronicle called bedlam in diamonds, would have been at all surprised to find that a German Riesling was the most expensive wine on the list. It was only during the 1970s that Riesling stumbled and the current hierarchy of status wines, with big reds dominating at the top, developed.

Compare the prices of Rhine and Moselle (Riesling) with those of Claret (Bordeaux) on the 1949 wine list of the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, Texas. (Listed in the picture and on the next pages.)

Rhine and Moselle Wine

American and Imported

---

Rhine Wines have been favorites in this country for more than a hundred years. Their gayety, their fresh, sprightly flavors and their entrancing bouquets have won friends everywhere. The wines of the Moselle, even more flowery and lighter than the Rhines, are likewise ranked among the world’s best White Wines. The California wines of the Rhine and Moselle type, like those from Alsace, have less bouquet and are heavier-bodied. They are, nonetheless, excellent light White Wines; clean, sound and charming. Those listed below represent the best that. Europe and America offer of these exquisite vintages.

---

Clarets

American and Imported

---

The red table wines of Bordeaux have been called Clarets by the English for centuries and we have borrowed the English usage. They include some of the greatest Red Wines in the world, as well as some of the finest wines that have ever been grown in California. The best of the American Clarets here shown have been made entirely from the authentic Cabernet grape variety from which all the finest French wines of this type are produced. Clarets will be found admirable with all red meat dishes, as well as with cheese. They are at their best at room temperature or slightly cooled.

---

The spritz of carbon dioxide in many Riesling wines is a natural effervescence that makes them taste even lighter and more refreshing.

— What You See Is What You Taste —

The right place to start with Riesling is the same place as with any other wine: By pouring some into a glass! Some wine geeks try to turn it into rocket science or religion, but actually wine is a beverage. A good Riesling contains many hundreds of different compounds, but the key to making sense of the taste is grasping the basics of how the major elements in there function. Read the next few pages and you’ll understand Riesling and many other wines better than some experts do.

Wine is here to be drunk, but before we drink it, we see it. One Australian expert claimed that he could identify any wine merely by looking at it. That would have been an amazing feat if he could’ve pulled it off, but again and again he failed spectacularly. It was great theater, though, because he was utterly convinced that he could do it. While it’s extremely difficult to draw conclusions about wine from its appearance alone, the fact is that Riesling almost always looks great in the glass. Pale with shimmers of green and silver, or a bright yellow color, or in the case of dessert wines, a rich gold or amber hue, it draws your hand to the glass. Tiny bubbles often cling to the inside surface of the glass, a natural effervescence that enhances its appearance. Sure looks good to me!

What we literally see influences how we see the wine—that is, what we make of it—just as it does with how we see other people. We may tell ourselves not to judge by appearances, but we frequently do. What the bottle looks like (its shape, its color, and whether it’s clean because it’s straight off the shelf or dusty from years in the cellar) and what’s on the label influence our opinion about a wine just as much as clothes and body language influence what we think about a person.

Let’s face it, the brand name on the label and the price tag are status signals, as well as useful information about the product. They interact with our expectations, which inevitably include some prejudices. By the way, I’m not exempt from prejudices, hard as I try to rid myself of them. The most common prejudices are that more expensive wines are better, that red wine is more important/serious/ manly than dry white, and that dry wine is more important/serious/manly than sweet wine. The price prejudice is as old as the hills, but those regarding wine color and dryness certainly weren’t shared by my grandparents’ generation.

In spite of the many changes in the wine world in recent years, according to current popular prejudice, the Ultimate Status Wines are still Grand Crus from Burgundy, France, like Romanée-Conti, and 1er Grand Cru Classé from Bordeaux, France, like Château Lafite Rothschild. Pour one of them in a fancy restaurant—for a four-figure price—and you’ll impress professionals and normal wine drinkers alike, long before they’ve taken the first sip. My experience has been that some bottles of the Ultimate Status Wines taste really fantastic, but others are disappointing, or even poor. To get to the actual taste, though, I had to get all the wine bling out of my mind, and it’s real hard work pushing that heavy historic French stuff aside. Sure you can consume Riesling in that situation, but then nobody will behave as if they’re about to meet God! That seems like a good thing to me.

Recent research by psychologists proves that if we think the wine offered to us is expensive, we’re probably going to think it tastes better. So Riesling’s generally modest prices work against it. However, I’ve observed that in relaxed situations, from picnics to nightcaps, that effect gets turned on its head. Of course, good seduction is totally sensual, for which a great taste is way more helpful than the collected bells and whistles of wine marketing. Bring on the Riesling!

When faced with a shelf full of unfamiliar wines, many consumers buy one based on the appearance of the bottle. This is an understandable reaction, and it happens to me too sometimes. Beautiful vineyard landscapes, imposing houses or castles, and cute animals on the label (a.k.a. Critter Wines) are ageold devices for making wines more appealing to us. The satirical newspaper the Onion came up with a Law of Critter Wines, saying that The quality of a wine is inversely proportional to the viciousness of the animal depicted on the label, i.e., the cuter the animal, the worse the wine will taste. In the case of labels with landscapes or houses or castles on the label, I think it’s probably better to say that there’s no clear relationship between their attractiveness and the taste of the wine. Ask for advice instead of trusting a pretty picture on the label. I do too if I don’t know the wine already.

Experience has taught me that the pieces of information on the label that actually tell you something about the taste of the wine are (1) the grape variety, (2) the producer, and (3) the indication of dryness or sweetness. Finding a bottle you’ll enjoy is therefore (almost) as easy as 1, 2, 3! Selecting a wine from a grape variety you like, from a good producer, and with the level of dryness/sweetness you prefer is almost a cast-iron guarantee of drinking pleasure. Vintage is way less important and overrated. You many be thinking, Why didn’t anyone tell me that wine was that simple 20 or 30 years ago? And I ask myself that question too.

It may sound too obvious to need mentioning, but the price tag tells you if you can afford a particular product, be it wine or anything else. I once handed my credit card to the saleswoman in a London fashion boutique to buy my girlfriend a sweater without looking at the price tag. I was saved from years of bleeding money only by the fact that the sweater was so expensive that the credit card company refused the transaction! Sometimes with wine I was less lucky and learned from painful experience that paying more than you want is deadly for the pleasure of wine.

Many wine drinkers find fancy stemware intimidating, and others think that although they look great they’re a waste of money. Sometimes high-end wine glasses are just expensive accessories for wine geeks, but a glass that’s been designed to help your nose capture the aromas of a good Riesling is a tool for extracting the maximum amount of pleasure from the wine in the glass, and I’m all in favor of that. Since I got into wine, the quality of stemware in restaurants and in people’s homes has soared. Thank you Riedel, the Austrian glass company, for showing the way and inspiring your competitors to try to match your stemware at lower prices! What’s the best Riesling glass on Earth today? The Zalto Universal glass, pictured on this page and this page, is the Stradivarius of stemware and perfect for almost every type of wine. Of course, a Stradivarius has its price and there are less expensive alternatives like the Riesling Grand Cru glasses from Riedel or Ravenscroft, the Spiegelau Winelovers white wine glass, or the Schott Zwiesel Tritan Pure Riesling. A glass like one of these does wonders for a wine’s aromas, which is the first element of the taste of Riesling to consider.

— Aroma, Part 1—Perfume, Memory, and Petrol —

Iwouldn’t be doing this job if good Riesling didn’t have such a ravishing and haunting perfume. A great Riesling is sexy in the way that a woman well matched with her fragrance is (please change the gender if necessary to fit your sexual orientation). However, when you look at how people actually drink wine, you find that a staggering number of them, including many of those who order the most expensive bottles in fancy restaurants, don’t smell the wine at all!

This is bad news for any wine, but it’s fatal for Riesling, because the wine’s great aromas are such a vital part of it. Putting your nose into a glass of Riesling (or any good wine, for that matter) and inhaling slowly through your nose is not a snobbish affectation; it’s the easy, no-cost way to increase the pleasure wine gives you. By not smelling the wine in their glass, millions of people are denying themselves a good part of that pleasure. Encouraging you to pay more attention to the smell of Riesling—of all wines!—is one of the most important things I can do.

One of the most fundamental experiences for my understanding of wine was visiting a nose, that is, an expert in the blending of perfumes, in his lab on Paris’s Rive Gauche, the walls of which were lined with glass bottles, each containing a potential ingredient for a new fragrance. He showed me the recipe for a new creation that was a list more than twice as long as a page of legal pad. If you could analyze and identify every substance in a great Riesling, you’d come up with a much longer list, and of course it’s nature that does the mixing. That list of ingredients for the fragrance was topped by a substance that was a double-digit percentage of the whole, and at the bottom was one for which the percentage started with a string of zeros after a decimal point before another figure appeared. How could something present in such a minute quantity influence the smell of the fragrance?

The nose took down one of the bottles to show me. He inserted the tip of a touche, a strip of absorbent paper, into the clear liquid it contained, then moved it in my direction. When it was still a couple of feet away, I could already smell green bell pepper, which I hate. As it came nearer, that smell suddenly became unbearably intense. He then explained that a tiny amount of something that smells unpleasant on its own could add something to a fragrance. For example, the same substance responsible for the pleasantly lived in smell of an apartment in a much higher concentration is responsible for the stink of sweaty socks. There are two aroma thresholds: one below which a particular aroma becomes undetectable; the other above which it turns unpleasant. Those thresholds are different for every single substance, and for each of us as well.

The aromas of different grape varieties are as distinctive as the colors and tastes of apple varieties, and we all know how different a Granny Smith tastes from a Golden Delicious. For example, one of the reasons for Sauvignon Blanc’s popularity is its instantly recognizable green aromas: bell pepper, gooseberry, nettles, etc. They all result from different minuscule amounts of a substance belonging to the same family of compounds as the one that the Parisian nose shocked me with (technical term: pyrazines). Think of the vermouth in James Bond’s martini if you pour that drink into a swimming pool and then pour that into the Indian Ocean is how Professor Hans R. Schultz of the wine school in Geisenheim, Germany, describes the concentration of those incredibly intense aromas in Sauvignon Blanc wines. By the way, the same family of substances also accounts for the green bell pepper aroma you find in wines from the Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot grapes too.

Some wine books say that Rieslings have a typical aroma and that it’s peach, but this is the result of a Eurocentric perspective. You certainly find a yellow peach aroma in many Rieslings from the valleys of the Rhine and Danube rivers and their tributaries, but in Australia the typical Riesling aroma is lime. Delve a bit further and you’ll find some Rieslings of the Rhine that smell of pear or grapefruit, some of the Danube that smell of apricot, and some of the Mosel in which black currant is the common fruit aroma. Given these regional differences, and that most good Riesling wines also have far more than just one fruity note, typical is an elastic term, which sometimes has little or nothing to do with the reality in the glass. However, one thing you can say for certain is that these fruity aromas are most forthright in young wines, meaning wines that are less than two years old.

What makes the smell of good Riesling wines so exciting is that in addition to those ripe fruity notes, they also have a huge range of herbal, spicy, and floral aromas. Sometimes these are more intense than the fruity ones, particularly in the case of high-end dry Rieslings, particularly wines of the new GG (full name: Großes Gewächs) category from Germany. In regions as widely separated as Germany’s Mosel and Western Australia’s Great Southern, each vineyard has its own distinctive aromas. That diversity is unexcelled in the world of wine.

Some of you are probably wondering why it’s taken me so long to reach what many experts consider the defining Riesling aroma, petrol. That’s because today the fruity and/or herbal, spicy, floral aromas tend to be more intense than the petrol-like note in young wines. I’m not the only professional to consider a strong petrol-like note in a young Riesling to be a serious weakness. Toast and bitumen have been suggested as alternative descriptors for the smell of this substance (technical term: TDN, which stands for 1,1,6-trimethyl-1,2-dihydronaphthalene—even scientists use the acronym!). In its most positive form, in certain Rieslings that are 10, 20, or more years of age, I smell bitumen and candied citrus fruits. You’ll probably find other words for this, though, because smell is such a personal thing; as with other wine aromas, petrol is something you either like or don’t.

Our smell memory functions completely differently than our memory for names, dates, and other facts. We remember the smells we associate with particularly positive or negative experiences—most important, those in our childhood. For the famous French novelist Marcel Proust, it was the smell of a madeleine cake dunked in lime-blossom tea. For me, among other things, it’s peaches—the slightly tart but intensely aromatic peaches from the tree in my maternal grandfather’s garden. In my mind, they are inseparable from the warm, inviting smell of my grandmother’s kitchen, where she cut them up and stoned them. Maybe that has something to do with my love affair with Riesling?

Much of what we think of as taste impressions are actually aromas we smell while food or beverages are in our mouths. For example, we smell peach rather than taste it. Our brains combine these with the actual taste impressions (sweetness, tartness, bitterness, saltiness, and umami or savory) and what the inside of our mouth feels. The aromas are the main reason why taste is so personal and why we all have strong likes and dislikes.

— Aroma, Part 2—It’s the Grapes, Stupid! —

The great thing about Riesling is that if you grow the grape in a location with a suitable climate, look after the vineyard well, and harvest a moderatesize crop, nature will give you all the aromas you could possibly want (unless the weather is terrible, which is rare). That’s where the most vital part of Riesling winemaking takes place, or as one American winemaker said to me, It’s the grapes, stupid!

Fully ripe wine grapes taste very different than table grapes do. Taste ripe Riesling grapes and you could be forgiven for asking what all the fuss is about, because although they taste rather sweet and fairly tart, they don’t taste that aromatic. This is because, as with most other wine grapes, almost all of their aromas are bound up in a form that makes them impossible for us to smell. They are released during and after fermentation, and the winemaker can influence how quickly they are released. If a special aroma yeast is used to max out the aromas by setting them all free at once during fermentation, then the wine will begin fading even before it reaches the market. So some of the most important aspects of Riesling winemaking are about capturing the natural aromas in the bottle in a stable form. If this works really well, then Riesling wines can retain their charm for decades, and sometimes even a century or more.

A cluster of wine grapes consists of a branched stalk to which anywhere from a few dozen to a couple of hundred berries are attached. Each grape variety has a distinctive cluster and berry shape, as well as a typical color for the ripe berries and the distinctive main aroma compounds in them. However, one thing they all have in common is that those aromas are in the skins of the berries, not in the juice or the pulp. Fully ripe Riesling grapes are golden berries with tiny brown spots on them, and the most attractive Riesling aromas form in the late fall; a rather reliable indicator that they’ve become packed with ripe aromas is when the grapes turn golden in color. By crushing the grapes and leaving them to stand (technical term: skin contact), the winemaker can extract more of the aromas from the skins into the juice. However, as we’ll see shortly, other substances get extracted from the skins at the same time, and they aren’t always positive. This brief moment in the winemaking process is crucial for Riesling.

Some experts have described dry Rieslings that they’ve found disappointingly thin as having denuded fruit, which suggests that the fruity aromas the wine once possessed were stripped out of it by clumsy handling in the cellar. However, that’s rarely the case. The more frequent cause of this problem is the combination of poor vineyard management and too large of a crop leading to grapes with too much acidity and too little aroma. Producing aromas costs the vine a great deal of energy—four to five times as much as producing the same weight of sugar. Do the math. Each vine manages to produce only a certain amount of those aromas, and if it has 20 clusters, then they will be spread half as thin as if they were divided between just 10 clusters.

Noble rot can radically alter the taste of grapes and the wine made from them. It is caused by the fungus Botrytis cineria, or simply Botrytis, which is present in the vineyards during the growing season, but the grapes must be soft and the conditions must be moist and at least reasonably warm for it to grow on them. Then a carpet-like layer of fungus can quickly cover the grapes. As suggested by the name, noble rot is a positive thing, but only if it develops in the right way and on grapes where the producer hoped for this. Exactly the same fungus is also responsible for gray rot, which can destroy the crop if conditions are too wet. Whether it is really useful to the winemaker also depends on what kind of wine she or he wants to make. If the goal is a dry Riesling, then noble rot will destroy the bright fruit and floral aromas that give these wines their charm, and may also make the wine too full-bodied. If the goal is a rich, sweet, and intensely flavored Riesling dessert wine, then full-blown noble rot is exactly what the winegrower wants. By the way, noble rot is also totally negative for all kinds of red wine grapes, because it destroys not only the fruity aromas but also the color in the grape skins.

Noble rot (the purple blotches) as it begins to engulf ripe Riesling grapes. The desire to avoid an X rating prevents us from showing the end result!

If you’re lucky enough to see nobly rotten Riesling grapes develop under favorable conditions—misty nights followed by dry sunny days—then you can easily follow the effect it has. First small, pale violet spots appear on the berries, then engulf the affected berries completely. What you can’t see with the naked eye, however,