Recently I have the good fortunate to try a whole range of Riesling from around the world and found that it is a style of wine that I liked generally.
Riesling is one of the interesting white grape variety which can produce extraordinary wines in every style from the bone dry to the super sweet style of wines. Riesling is like a Sauvignon Blanc which expresses the different flavours when planted on different soils and produce distinctively different wine styles depending on the climate where it is grown.
German Riesling are the most famous. There is different level of clasification on the level of sweetness for German Riesling:
The most dry style ( least sweet) will be the Troken. In increasing order of sweetness will be Kabinett, Spatlese ( Late Harvest), Auslese, Goldkaspel ( Gold Capsule), BA ( Beerenauslese ) ,Eiswein ( Ice Wine) and most sweet will be TBA( TrokenBeerenauslese).
Auslese is considered as very good quality and sweet. BA, Eiswein and TBA are dessert wines with the TBA as been the rarest of them all. If anyone has tried a TBA do let me know how is tastes like.
A lot of the New Zealand and Australian Riesling been made are more of the off dry style. This means that there is the acidity which is well balanced against a sweeetness in the body with a good finish. Actually riesling goes very well with almost all types of food.
For Alsace Riesling, the ones that I have tried are more of the drier style which means that it is not sweet and what you get is a lot of minerality. I still prefer the sweeter style of Riesling.
Currently, one of my favourite Riesling excluding the German Riesling Spatlese and Auslese is the Mount Brown Riesling 2010 from New Zealand Waipara Valley. It is a light bodied wine which has good acidity balanced with sweetness hence making it a very refreshing wine by itself or with food.
