Diary of a Shopkeeper, 21st July 2024

July is the month when independent wine shops across the country unite in celebrating the great white grape of German wine: Riesling.

It’s a long-standing observation in the trade that, if you asked 100 wine merchants what their desert island wine would be, 50 would say Chardonnay and 50 would say Riesling. Not Port, not Claret, not even Gran Reserva Rioja – but one of the two white wines that members of the public are most likely to avoid. In both cases, current unpopularity is a reaction to extraordinary success in the past. Sunny, buttery Chardonnay from Australia was so popular in the 80s and 90s, that by the start of this century everyone was fed up of it and went for ABC (‘Anything But Chardonnay.’)

In the case of Riesling, reaction against it was even stronger, perhaps because for several decades from the 1960s onwards, white wine in the UK was German and rarely anything else. Labels like Black Tower, Blue Nun and Liebfraumilch were pioneers of wine branding. What went inside the bottle was less important than a snazzy design and memorable advertising. The fact that the wine was generally distinctly sweet made it an easy entry point for a population that wasn’t accustomed to the often-astringent wines favoured by countries with long traditions of wine drinking.

By the year 2000, the fact that these famous German bottles contained blends of grapes other than Riesling didn’t matter. Anything in a tall thin bottle, with a name in old-fashioned Gothic lettering, became something to avoid. Unless, that is, you ran a wine shop, or had wine-enthusiast friends who visited Germany, or otherwise got the chance to try some of the sublime Riesling wines that were still being produced there. As they had been long before Liebfraumilch put them in the shade. And as they are now, thank goodness.

The great news is that there’s a wider range of German Riesling available in this country than ever before. It’s now easy to sample wines from different parts of the country, and start to explore the typical styles of those areas.

I’ve only travelled once to Germany on a wine trip, and that was in February 2020, just before the pandemic gates slammed down. The day we were due to fly back from Frankfurt was the day Flybe went bust, resulting in a mad dash across the border to Luxembourg to catch the only flight back to Scotland available that day. Maybe those dramatic circumstances helped make it a particularly memorable trip. It was also an eye-opening trip. I came to appreciate the different styles of the regions we visited: the broad, fruity Rieslings of Nahe, full-bodied versions in Franconia, and the elegant, slatey Rieslings from the steeply sloping vineyards of Mosel.

AJ Adam’s precipitous Häs’chen vineyard in the Mosel Valley. Häs’chen refers to the hares that lived here in the past and made a rare reappearance for this photo.

Earlier this month we carried out some staff training, tasting and discussing six different German Rieslings from different areas. I prepared a tasting sheet with the name, vintage and price of the wine down one side, and, after a space for tasting notes, a separate column for ‘Sweetness/10.’ A degree of sweetness is often noticeable in Rieslings, and I thought it might be useful for us to try and assess where the different bottles sat on a scale of 1 to 10. It quickly became clear, however, that it was impossible to mark the wines that way. Why? Because, although all of them did suggest sweetness at one level or another, they were all also noticeably acidic. Orkney fudge is sweet; lemon juice is acidic; but good Riesling somehow combines both those qualities in a single miraculous mouthful.

The main challenge for German Riesling is certainly not the quality of the wine. There are easy drinking fruity wines that are delicious in almost any context; there are distinctly dry versions, piercing as lime juice, and just as refreshing; and there are lusciously sweet versions to accompany dessert – or instead of dessert. The quality is unimpeachable. The challenge remains the complexity of the often old fashioned labels, which doesn’t help overcome residual public suspicion of German wines. But there’s an easy solution: just ask your friendly local wine merchant for advice. Prost!

We are running a German Riesling promo throughout July. We have an extended range of ten varied Rieslings to try, in different styles from different areas. There’s 10% off all of them all month, as well as bags, pens and other giftlets while stocks last.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 25th July 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.