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Riesling Rediscovered
Bold, Bright, and Dry
By John Winthrop Haeger UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96216-3
CHAPTER 1
The Riesling Predicament
EVERY VERY GOOD WINE is a trifecta of variety, place, and style. Variety, of course, refers to the wine's varietal composition. Place denotes the wine's geographic origin. And style is shorthand for most other factors, such as whether the wine was made still or sparkling, heady or light, sweet or dry. These three parameters are kaleidoscopically interwoven and subtly interdependent, but in the end they all determine a wine's individual properties — from color, strength, structure, taste, and smell to reputation, cost, price, and suitability.
The pages that follow discuss one wine grape variety, Riesling, made as monovarietal wine, grown in dozens of different sites across the Northern Hemisphere, and vinified so that the finished wine is dry. Before we begin this exploration of specifics, a bit more attention to the wine's background is appropriate.
VARIETY
In the universe of wine grapes, varieties are in fact cultivars — natural seedling progeny of cross-pollinated parent vines chosen and propagated by human intervention. Varieties have been with us more or less as long as people have made wine and cultivated grapes, but they were not an object of systematic attention or a key element in wine nomenclature until fairly recently. Familiar as varietal names now appear to wine consumers around the world, ranging through the alphabet from Albariño to Zinfandel, most varieties were not segregated in vineyards, made monovarietally, or featured on wine labels until the past 150 or so years. And the science that has finally begun to make sense of the large universe of varieties, and to reveal parental and sibling relationships among them, developed only in the 1990s. Today at least 1,400 wine grape varieties are known to be present in the world's commercial vineyards, and each has been genetically fingerprinted and is distinguishable from all others. While this number seems enormous at first blush, the count would be considerably higher if varieties grown noncommercially or experimentally were added in, along with varieties present only in conservatory collections or known to have existed in the past but not to have survived. And this figure does not include the varieties — not cultivars — that existed only for the lifetime of a single vine plant that was never chosen or propagated by a curious farmer.
On the other hand, the number of varieties that have attracted widespread, significant, and sustained interest from winegrowers and therefore are grown today in many corners of the global vineyard — varieties generally known as classic, major, or international — amount to only a few dozen. This list, largely a product of European immigration to the New World in the 19th century, expands from time to time as European varieties of hitherto only local interest are discovered by New World vintners and transplanted. Consider the sagas of Vermentino and Grüner Veltliner, for example, barely known 20 years ago outside their habitats around the Tyrrhenian Sea and in Austria, respectively, but now looking suspiciously international. But the converse trend is stronger: already-dominant varieties such as Chardonnay are more widely planted everywhere, largely because nothing succeeds like success and thus these varieties make eminent economic sense. Meanwhile, less-visible varieties are abandoned and disappear.
PLACE
If our contemporary preoccupation with grape varieties, our growing knowledge of varieties and their relationships, and our increasing reliance on varietal names for the taxonomies of wine have made variety seem to be the primary element in the trifecta of excellent wine, place deserves at least as much attention, and arguably more. Until the past century, wine taxonomies were overwhelmingly geographical, not varietal, because as early as Roman times, we had recognized that regions and sites differ from one another, even if our understanding of the science of differences was imperfect. The names of wines were the names of vineyards or vineyard blocks, themselves often derived from physical, cultural, or ecological features of the landscape or chosen as references to nearby villages, towns, administrative districts, or ports of embarkation. In this context, no feature of the land where grapes are farmed is, or ever was, prima facie irrelevant to the wine produced. Certainly, a site's latitude and climate are relevant, as well as its elevation, orientation, aspect, proximities, and exposures; the physical and chemical properties of its dirt and even the microflora in it; and the uses imposed on neighboring land. As the legendary English wine writer Hugh Johnson is supposed to have summarized it, "In the case of wine, where it comes from is the whole point" (quoted in Blanning 2009).
In recent decades, much of the conversation about place and wine has invoked the French word terroir. Print appearances of the word are now so ubiquitous that it is rarely italicized in English; whole books have been written about terroir by geologists and plant scientists, and no issue of any wine magazine, in any European language, is terroir-free. Never mind that the word itself, in anything approximating its current meaning, is younger than the Industrial Revolution and has been used to denote the "somewhereness" of individual wines for barely a century. Individual commentators and winegrowers have permitted themselves personal and sometimes idiosyncratic redefinitions of the word. Grosso modo, terroir is modern shorthand for the imprint of site-specific properties on individual wines. The word has evolved into an umbrella term that subsumes everything mysterious about the properties of wine, and it is now a touchstone for everyone who contends, as many do, that all very good wine is made in the vineyard, not in the cellar.
STYLE
Style, the third part of the trifecta, is less familiar to wine consumers than variety or terroir. It is also more troubled territory, but no less important for its handicaps. It has recently attracted attention in spite of itself as ultraripe flavors and concomitant increases in alcohol content, especially in New World red wines, have provoked pushback from many somme-liers and some wine writers, and as barrel-fermented Chardonnays, redolent of oak, butter, and vanilla and kissed with residual sweetness, have become so ubiquitous that many consumers erroneously think of these attributes as properties of the grape variety itself. The pushback is illustrated by the creation, in 2011, of an organization called In Pursuit of Balance, which focuses on encouraging "balance" in California winemaking, especially as it affects Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and by the publication of a book by former San Francisco Chronicle wine editor Jon Bonné celebrating winemakers who are "rewriting the rules of contemporary winemaking by picking grapes earlier and seeking to reduce alcoholic strength" (Bonné 2013). Although the object of attention in both cases is wine style, the s-word itself is barely mentioned in language that concentrates instead on the "promotion of varietal characteristics" and on varieties as "vehicles for the expression of terroir," per In Pursuit of Balance's website. Winemakers themselves seem uncomfortable with the idea that style is an essential parameter of wine, endlessly repeating the catechism that very good wine "makes itself" as long as the grapes have been properly grown. In these pages, I argue the converse: style is everything about wine that is neither terroir (mediated by viticulture) nor variety, and it is the outcome of a long list of winemaking choices. Some relationship always exists, of course, both logically and empirically, between the expression of place and the way a wine is made; winemaking is critical to very good wines, and it is a conscious, thoughtful, and usually beneficial symbiosis with raw material. Nevertheless, style is different from both variety and terroir.
Style begins with the protocol that governs the harvest. This includes such factors as whether the vineyard is picked in a single pass, for example, or several times to segregate fruit of different maturities; how mature the grapes are when they are picked; and whether grape clusters are pressed directly, partially crushed, destemmed, or even partially dried before pressing. Whether botrytis is present, and whether botrytis-affected clusters are kept separate from the rest. Whether the juice is clarified before fermentation or afterward, or both. Whether the fermentation environment is heated, chilled, or otherwise modified. How much contact is permitted between juice and skins and between new wine and lees. Whether the fermentation is deliberately interrupted, left to itself, or encouraged to consume all available sugar. Whether anything is added to the wine, briefly or permanently, to flavor it, alter its natural chemistry, deactivate bacteria, or prevent secondary fermentation. And, in the time since distillation was "invented," whether the wine is fortified, or, in very recent years, whether some of the alcohol produced by fermentation was removed. Style-based choices have been part and parcel of viniculture at least since classical antiquity, ceaselessly reflecting the status of wine among other drinks, the ebb and flow of consumer tastes, and the determinative effect of consumer preferences and valuations on markets.
RIESLING
Vintners and wine writers widely agree that Riesling, the object of attention in these pages, is an important international variety. It occupies a total of more than 50,000 hectares worldwide, overwhelmingly in the Northern Hemisphere, but it is also solidly anchored in the antipodes. It is grown on every wine-producing continent, in at least a dozen European countries, and in no fewer than nine American states and three Canadian provinces. While Chardonnay, a variety that has become almost synonymous with white wine in much of the wine-drinking world, beats Riesling in terms of surface planted almost four to one, Riesling is almost as widespread as Pinot Gris and more than three times as widely planted as Chenin Blanc.
Its desirable varietal properties, wherever it grows, include late budding and late ripening, high tolerance for cold winters, considerable drought resistance, good concentration, truth to variety even at relatively high yields, high adaptability to a wide range of mesoclimates and soil types, a large and brilliant flavor palette, and wines that age astonishingly well. David Schildknecht, the eminent American wine writer, summarizing Riesling for the Internationales Riesling Symposium held at Eltville, in the German Rheingau, in 2010, called attention to Riesling's "fragrance, finesse, freshness, elegance, and reflection of vintage and terroir."
Riesling underwent a period of quantitative decline during the middle of the 20th century owing to the passing infatuation with the high-yield variety Müller-Thurgau — a Riesling cross with an earlier cross of uncertain parentage called Madeleine Royale — in cool-climate parts of Europe and losses to the Chardonnay tsunami in Australia, California, and parts of South America. But it has been on the rebound since the 1990s: its planted surface increased by 14 percent in Germany between 1985 and 2012 and by 16 percent in Austria between 1999 and 2009; doubled in California between 2004 and 2011; and surged 60 percent in Washington State between 1997 and 2006. In the United States, the market for Riesling-based wines has been impressively strong, although only as compared to their earlier, very weak sales. Point-of-sale data, primarily from large supermarkets, shows a 54 percent increase in Riesling sales between 2005 and 2007, which established Riesling as the fastest-growing varietal wine in American markets between 2006 and 2011, with increased sales at all price points. Wine imports to the States from Germany also nearly tripled between 1999 and 2007, rising from 1.2 to 3.2 million cases, of which Riesling was a substantial share. As early as 1990, Washington surpassed California as the area of greatest Riesling production in the States, and it is now home to the world's largest Riesling producer, the formidable Chateau Ste. Michelle.
The suitability of certain varieties to certain geographic locations, and of certain locations to certain varieties, has been studied for more than half a century, especially in the New World, where the earliest plantings of wine grapes often were an experimental jumble. The work done beginning in the 1940s at the University of California, Davis, by Maynard Amerine and A.J. Winkler on "heat summation" (measured in degree-days) and on regions then classified by heat summation is well known and has been widely used to align macroclimates with appropriate varieties. Their essential insight — that temperature alone controls the botanical process that ripens wine grapes — has been confirmed by subsequent research and experience and is summarized in a book by the insightful Australian agricultural scientist John Gladstones (Gladstones 2011). Yet generally, viticulturists now focus less on the minimum heat accumulation necessary to ripen any individual variety, primarily because most wine regions now accumulate more heat than they did a generation ago, making excess heat more problematic than heat deficit. As vine-trellising systems have also changed, the microconditions surrounding grape clusters have replaced macroclimatic air temperature as an object of attention, drawing interest to berries' flesh or juice temperature and therefore also to factors such as clusters' exposure to direct or dappled sunlight, the effect of topsoil color on the wavelength of light reflected from the ground, and on enzymatic responses to specific light frequencies. A generation ago, ripening itself was construed as a single biochemical process measured by sugar accumulation. Now viticulturists, winemakers, wine writers, and even consumers talk about ripening as multiple concurrent, but not entirely simultaneous, processes, and they routinely distinguish so-called flavor or physiological ripening from sugar ripening. Much of the recent professional literature relevant to Riesling was summarized by Hans Reiner Schultz, the president of Geisenheim University, in his presentation to the 2014 Internationales Riesling Symposium: he said that Riesling needs "cool to intermediate climates to ripen its crop properly," but that it may tolerate high maxima, albeit with attendant stylistic differences, if the maxima are offset by "cofactors in quality formation" such as diurnal temperature variation, sunshine hours, or water availability. And, although the climatic differences among Riesling-friendly areas are "relatively large," the impact of such differences on wine styles are quite imperfectly understood (Schultz 2014).
For all its plasticity, however, Riesling is scarcely insensitive to environments. On the contrary, it is widely appreciated for its great transparency to site, a property it appears to share especially with Pinot Noir. In other words, the expression of Riesling varies quite perceptibly from one vineyard location to the next, responding to very subtle differences in meso- and microclimate, altitude, aspect, slope, proximity to water, air circulation, and many properties of soil. Key soil properties are not limited to the usual suspects, vigor and water retention, but also include porosity, granularity, depth, capacity for heat retention, color, and chemical composition. If the whys and wherefores of terroir are still very imperfectly understood, empirical differences among sites are still clearly evident: dark, slate-based soils are warmer at midday than loess or limestone, hastening ripening, but the wavelength of reflected light affects the activity of enzymes in grapes, which respond to the ratio of red to far-red light. Thus reddish surface soils, usually red because iron oxides are abundant, tend to correlate with faster sugar accumulation — helpful in cooler climates but not in warmer spots — and with increased content of anthocyanins in grape skins. The latter is not hugely important for Riesling but could be important for a red variety such as Pinot Noir.
Riesling, as a variety and as a vehicle for the expression of terroir, is almost universally exalted by wine professionals. David Schildknecht's summary, quoted above, is complemented by the general critical opinion that, if Chardonnay made from vines in Corton-Charlemagne, Montrachet, or Valmur in Chablis constitutes the gold standard for great white wine of "table" strength and commands the highest prices for such wines worldwide, Riesling is not far behind, except as to price. The late Steve Pitcher (1945–2012), a San Francisco–based wine writer with a special affection for German wines, explicitly compared Riesling to White Burgundy in 1997, calling it "qualitatively equivalent" (Pitcher 1997). A 2006 book by a fellow San Franciscan, Master Sommelier Evan Goldstein, called special attention to Riesling's "balanced acidity" and its "capacity to explode on the palate with a bevy of flavors that scream fruit ... while being firmly underscored by slatey and petrol-like earth notes" (Goldstein 2006). For Jancis Robinson, MW, Riesling "could claim to be the finest white grape variety in the world on the basis of the longevity of its wines and their ability to transmit the characteristics of a vineyard" (Robinson 2006). "A star," she adds on jancisrobinson.com, "and one of my great wine heroes."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Riesling Rediscovered by John Winthrop Haeger. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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