WTF is Riesling?

Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to the Wine Pair podcast. I’m Joe, your sommelier of reasonably priced wines, and this is my wife and wine-tasting partner in crime Carmela. And we are the Wine Pair. Say hello, Carmela.

Today we are doing our first WTF or What the Fuck series, and for this episode, we are going to be drinking Riesling. So, what is the WTF series?

Well, let me tell you! In this series, we are doing to taste and rate wines that you can find at your local grocery store or wine shop or online wine store that fall into a category that people may find confusing or intimidating or just plain scary. That’s right, I said scary. Because part of what we are trying to do in our podcast is to get you to drink a wines that are not just Chardonnay or Rose’. Ok?!?

How do you feel about the name of this series, Carmela? (By that I mean What the Fuck?)

Now, Riesling is a white wine, and so we REALLY want to see if we can help wean you from thinking that the only white wine to drink is a Chardonnay and help you find some other wines that you might actually like and that don’t taste like carpola. And you know that I hate Chardonnay - so in this series, we are NOT going to talk about Chardonnay

I think some people don’t think much of riesling because it has a reputation. What is that reputation, Carmela? 

Yes, very often people think that riesling wines, or white wines in general are sweet wines. That is definitely not the case. Some white wines are sweet. And I am not saying that sweet wines aren’t good or worthy of your time or money, but white wines often get a bad rap for being cheap or sweet or just not very good - or not having much to them. They are, unfortunately, sometimes gendered - that’s a wine for women, for instance, which is just stupid since white wines all over the world are consumed by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. 

Some other reasons people don’t choose white wines are because they think they can only be consumed with fish and seafood. Which, again, is wrong. Now, white wines do tend to go much better with seafood without a doubt. But that is not an unbreakable rule. There are red wines that do quite well with seafood, but you are not going to drink a stupid cabernet with fish. Am I right?

So, let’s have a talk. You really like seafood, and I really don’t like seafood all that much. I mean, I do like somethings like sushi, clams, grilled shrimp and that sort of thing. But you love it. Why? Why do you love fish so much? What do you love about it?

Well, I really like spicy foods, which you don’t love so much, but many white wines also go GREAT with spicy foods. You are not a huge spicy food fan, are you? 

In fact, sometimes spicy foods just don’t hold up well to red wines. But I love white wine with Chinese food. Like, last night in fact, we had some General Tso’s chicken (which is not really a real Chinese food, I mean, you find it all over America, but you are not going to find it in China, trust me) and white wine is like “angels singing.” Maybe some day we’ll talk about my trips to Shanghai. That’s for the future, but let me tell you - you ain’t going to find food in Shanghai that is anything like Panda Express. 

And, in future podcasts we’ll talk about other kinds of food that go well with white wines, but we have to get MOVING!

Let’s talk about what the fuck a riesling is. The rieslings we are going to drink today are all dry rieslings, so not sweet. That doesn’t mean they won’t have some sweetness to them, some sweet aspects in how they test. And, yes, there are many rieslings that do tend to be on the sweet side and rieslings can range from very dry to super sweet. 

Where do you think rieslings are from?

Rieslings are mostly known for being from Germany, but there are great rieslings grown all over the world. Germany does grow the most riesling, and it sometimes goes by a different name in German, such as mosel or pfalz. But a lot of riesling is grown in France - in the Alsace region near Germany, in the US, Australia, Hungary, Austria, and in places like Canada, New Zealand, Croatia, and the Czech Republic. 

Today, we are going to taste several dry rieslings that you should be able find at your local grocery store or Total Wine or BevMo or at an online wine store at a reasonable price, and we are going to rate them on our ten point scale - I will say that all of these are highly rated wines and fit in our price range. We’ll talk about how they smell, how they look, how they taste, and what food they might go with. And if the wine is shit, we’ll tell you that, too. We’ll tell you where we bought the wine, how much we paid for it, and let you know if we think you should bother to buy it. 

If you are new to our podcast or haven’t really gotten a handle on our ten point scale, there are a few key things to tell you about. And you can learn more on our website The Wine Pair Podcast.com

• First, the ten point scale is pretty simple, and we will give wines points all along the scale unlike wine scores from other sources which seem to never go below 80.
• Second, our ten point scale is based on our tastes and our palette, which may be very different from yours, and that is GREAT. We want you to compare your taste in wine to ours, and to understand how you feel about wines and our ratings of wines to what you like. You may totally disagree with us on a rating, and that is perfect. That will help you make the best decision.

Rather than biasing you with the classic flavors of a riesling, Carmela, we’ll taste and smell these wines and see what we think, and then we can review what a dry riesling is supposed to taste like. But we are going to use normal words and normal flavor comparisons, and not stuff that you can’t understand or relate to like honeysuckle or beeswax or gooseberry. 

Wines

Dr. Heidemanns

Region: Germany, Mosel region

Producer: Dr. Heidemanns

Year: 2020

Price: $15.29 (90 rating in WE)

Retailer: Total Wine (Winery direct - which means they probably can sell it at a lower price because they are buying in bulk)

13.5% alcohol 

Rating: 8 Carmela, 9 Joe

Kung Fu Girl Riesling

Region: Columbia Valley in Washington State

Producer: Charles Smith Wines

Year: 2019

Price: $9.97 (WS gave the 2015 a 90)

Retailer: Total Wine

12% alcohol

Rating: Carmela 9, Joe 8

Trimbach (very highly rated)

Region: Alsace, France (All-Sas)

Producer: Trimbach

Year: 2018

Price: $18.45 (WE 92, WS #35 in top 100 o 2020)  (91 WS 2017, 92 JS 2019)

Retailer: Total Wine - definitely on sale. This one barely makes the cut

13% alcohol

Rating: Carmela 5, Joe 6

Let’s go over the classic flavor profile for a riesling to see how we did - is lime and other citrus (lemon, pink grapefruit), green apple (pear, melon, nectarine), can also have tropical fruit, beeswax (earthy like chalk, wet slate, ginger), jasmine (flowers), sometimes spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla bean), and petroleum (diesel), and sometimes there can be redfruit like a white (Rainier) cherry or strawberry, and sometimes herbs like basil or rosemary.

So, here are the wines again, and whether we think you should buy them or not. Let’s recheck our ratings. 

Ok, so if you have ideas for wines you would like us to try and give you advice on for future podcasts, let us know. We’d love that! Or if you just have topics that you want us to talk about, just let us know and we’ll try and weave it into an episode. You can reach out to us at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com and you can also find us on our website - thewinepairpodcast.com. And you can follow us on instagram and twitter as well! And you can subscribe to our podcast on lots of different platforms!

Thanks for listening to the Wine Pair podcast, and we will see you next time. And, as we say, life is short, so stop drinking shitty wine.