A not-too-sweet Riesling for your holiday parties
Don't be afraid of sweetness—the notes in this off-dry Riesling stand-up nicely to holiday fare.
Clean Slate Riesling
$11.49 10.8% alcohol
PLCB Item #5964
Sale price through 12/31 – regularly $13.49
Last week, we noted that a new wave of lightly sweet red wines are all the rage. On the white side of the wine fence, there’s nothing new about a kiss of sweetness in wines like this riesling, a spectacular zinger that consistently overperforms in its price tier. Indeed, some regions have been producing lightly sweet white wines for centuries as an adaptation to their unusually cold climate, most notably Germany. Understanding climate’s relevance to wine sweetness also helps explain why sweeter red wines did not emerge until far more recently.
In most wine regions, making only dry wine was standard practice by necessity. During fermentation, living yeast cultures convert grape sugar into alcohol. Prior to the advent of modern technology, this process simply could not be controlled once it began. Fermentation had to run its course until all sugar had been consumed, at which point the spent yeasts would settle as sediment, leaving a clear, stable wine behind. In the northernmost regions of Europe like Germany’s Mosel Valley, vintners faced two unique circumstances that made it possible to bottle a clear, stable wine before all grape sugar had been depleted.
First, their harvests came far later in the fall than in warmer regions, and often at far lower degrees of fruit ripeness. Second, their unheated wine cellars got cold enough in winter to send active yeasts into hibernation, creating a months-long pause towards the end of the fermentation process where clear lightly-sweet wine could be siphoned off its inactive yeast sediment.
To this day, the Mosel region produces the world’s finest off-dry wines, for reasons that become apparent on first sip of this brilliant bargain. While anyone anywhere can now mimic the temperature drop needed to preserve a suggestion of sweetness in their wine, most cannot compete with the finesse of the German style, which relies on the sharp citrusy acidity of under-ripe fruit and very low natural alcohol content to provide its quenching knife’s edge balance of sweet versus tart. Each sip is like taking a bite into a perfectly chilled, perfectly fresh Granny Smith apple on a hot day.
Also available at:
WineWorks in Marlton, NJ- $9.98
https://www.wineworksonline.com/
Canal’s Liquors in Pennsauken, NJ - $9.99
Canal’s in Mt. Ephraim, NJ, - $9.99