Riesling to the Rescue The Greatest White Wine in the World is Also the Most Versatile

Class transcript:

Welcome one and all. Welcome, welcome, everybody! Thank you guys so much for joining us for Lesson Number Two of #stayhome wineschool um, we um we uh are thrilled to have you guys in the mix. How do we do that? Um, if you haven't muted yourself already, uh, please uh, please do so. Any it's okay. Um, at any rate, uh, I'm anticipating uh quite a few participants and as much as I would love to hear from all of you, um, I don't want to pick favorites, so um, Joan will be unmuted um for the sake of um moderating as she did last time uh to uh excellent effect, but everybody else uh will be uh muted for the sake of this uh exercise. Thank you all so much.

for joining us just to review provisioning uh you can see here i have uh one dry and uh one sweet riesling uh in the mix as you all should um that's one dry and one sweet riesling in the mix uh great background though um and uh at any rate i recommend that you all do the same um i also have so the idea here one dry one sweet first and foremost in a perfect universe um the dry one sweet first and foremost in a perfect universe um the dry one sweet first and foremost in a perfect universe um the dry one sweet first and foremost in a perfect universe um the dry wine 

would be from the dry one sweet first and foremost in a perfect universe um the dry wine uh would be from the dry wine uh would be from outside of the uh historic and spiritual home outside of the uh historic and spiritual home outside of the uh historic and spiritual home of the recent great germany and the of the recent great germany and the of the recent great germany and the sweeter wine should be from sweeter wine should be from sweeter wine should be from uh germany proper uh that said um uh germany proper uh that said um uh germany proper uh that said um again i think for the sake of this again i think for the sake of this again i think for the sake of this exercise in particular exercise in particular Exercise in particular we're going to have more of a polyglot, we're going to have more of a polyglot all about Riesling here, and get a sense, hopefully, of how Riesling plays with food.

So, in addition to two bottles, I recommended some food, some little nibbles, and corresponding to four different flavor profiles, something fatty, something salty, something sweet, and something spicy, fourth of all, and that was because we want to try those flavor profiles with our wines, and, you know, Riesling as a dry wine, Riesling as a sweet wine, pair very differently with different types of flavors, and I think that's really fun to explore. It is one of the, you know, wonderful virtues of Riesling, its versatility, its amenability for the sake of different flavor profiles. So, I've got my two bottles. I've got my spread of Yuppie Chow, which is off-camera here. I have two glasses. Just to review the glassware, I like wine glasses that have a sufficiently large bowl to hold a full glass, so four to five ounces, and remain about a third full, and narrower at the top than at the base.

Stem, no stem, doesn't make much of a difference. It should be said the stem itself evolved just to keep our grubbiness away from the bowl, but I hope you all are well-provisioned. Should you have any questions? If you have questions about individual wines that you have on hand, should you have any questions about, you know, what to open, please hit us up via the chat box, and Joan will be kind of monitoring that and bringing those to my attention throughout this exercise. Without further ado, let's get started. Thank you all, first and foremost, for joining again. I've been humbled to be here. I'm honored and honored by the response to this activity, and in the midst of a pandemic, which has been a bit of an existential crisis for me, as someone who pours wine for a living and pops corks, it has been nice to find a virtual platform for this, you know, peculiar skill set, so thank you all so much.

Joan, again, will be joining us, and we'll be taking a few more breaks for the sake of all of your excellent questions. I wanted to kick this off a bit like a wedding, to begin things and just acknowledge some folks participating around Terra Firma. You know, it's common at a wedding to acknowledge the folks that come from the furthest flung to attend. You know, the obligations here are a little less onerous, but nonetheless, our reach is global. It's very exciting. A shout-out to Jill Tyler's parents, who hopefully, if they can get the boat within range, they'll be listening from the U.S. Virgin Islands. A shout-out to Sarah and our Italian Sommelier crew in Campania and Rome. Shout-out to Noah's aunt on the West Coast.

A shout-out to One Victoria MoCo in Jakarta, and everyone else wherever you might be joining us. We're going to kick it off here with a bit of verse, as we always do, and I am once again rocking the lullabies. Low-fi visuals here. At some point, we may get more sophisticated, but we haven't reached that level of proficiency with the Zoom software as of yet. So the first bit of verse here, inspired by our class today, is from a more modern poet. That's from Gabrielle Calvo Curesi. She teaches at UNC Chapel Hill, and it's called, At Last, the New Arriving. Like the horn you played in Catholic school, the city will open its mouth and cry out. Don't worry about nothing, don't mean no thing.

It will leave you stunned, as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut, who's told he won the whole damn purse. It will feel better than any floor that's risen up to meet you. It will rise like Easter bread, golden and familiar in your grandmother's hands. She'll come back, heaven having been too far from home to hold her. Oh, it will be beautiful. Every girl will ask you to dance, and the boys won't kill you for it. Shake your head. Dance. Dance. Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize you are. What a lucky sack of stars. The beautiful verse, you know, I love that last line, what a lucky sack of stars, as we are all. Wine made from the same stuff as we are. Riesling in particular really captures that immediacy of joy for me.

It's a grape that can be both just, you know, flirty, fun, ebullient, and equally profound, as it ages. And it is one of life's great joys. It is equally maddening, it should be said. And for those of you, you know, shopping for Rieslings and trying to discern, you know, which one is dry, which one is sweet, you know, I share your pain. Riesling's a bit like a members-only social club. You know, you have to, you work at it. You know, it's a nerdy, you know, kind of enterprise, but, you know, once you are hip to the ins and outs, you know, you're ready to go. You're ready to be the insider, gossip, you know. Riesling is a grape that really, you know, snatches its hooks in you and never lets go.

Like Chardonnay, I studied last time, it comes in many shapes and sizes, but I find Riesling even more enduring in its own way. So for the sake of our last lesson, we talked over tasting analytically and teasing out, you know, not only what do we like in a wine, what, you know, do we like better in one wine than in another. But considering, you know, why, you know, that is, what happened to create, you know, this unique set of flavor profiles in the glass, you know, what factors ultimately shaped what I'm drinking. And we talked about, you know, the sight, the smell, and then the palate of a wine. And you know, thinking discerningly about each of those parts of the tasting equation. And we will continue to apply that methodology.

Today, although we won't belabor it quite as much as we did the last time. As always, if you find yourself impatient, please drink; You know, don't wait for my word. Wine class is more fun with wine. Well, we talked over four variables, characteristics that ultimately shape, you know, the totality of our experience of a wine. And those were sweetness, acidity, alcohol, and tannin. Today, we're going to focus on tannin. We're going to focus on sweetness in wine, and particularly how that plays with another variable in acidity. And, you know, I think it's a really interesting way to consider Riesling, because most people think of Riesling as exclusively a sweet grape. It should be said that historically, Riesling was dry. This whole notion of Riesling as a sweeter wine is a post-World War II phenomenon.

But, you know, Riesling comes in many shapes and sizes. And we want to celebrate that diversity and understand, you know, what we are talking about when we're talking about sweetness. And then the last element is kind of introducing food in the mix. I was inspired by the beautiful photo shots of, shoots of kind of cartoony boards and the like that you guys brought to class last time, and figured we might as well play along and try Riesling with food, because, you know, part of Riesling's appeal is unlocked when you are enjoying it. Enjoying it alongside, you know, you have to be generous. Hey, Bill. A few questions with, just, should people start with the dry or the sweet, quite a few are asking. Excellent question. I buried the lead, Joan.

They should start with the dry. You know, that's not to say that you can't bounce back and forth in the course of this exercise, but, you know, the sweet will, to some extent, prejudice your experience of the dry. So, we should start with the dry. We should start with the dry for the sake of this activity. Now, we are going to consider the grape itself, as we did the last time. Riesling is a noble grape, and fascinatingly enough, it is the offspring of Guaiblanc, which you may remember from our last lesson was the parent of one Chardonnay. Now, Guaiblanc for the sake of Riesling is a bit of an only parent, as far as we know, it is.

We haven't unlocked yet who that other parent of Riesling is, and it should be said that Riesling is a much more ancient grape in and of its own right than Chardonnay; the first documented instance of Riesling dates from the middle of the 15th century in Frankfurt. Riesling didn't come into its golden age until the 19th century in Germany, but that was well before Chardonnay; and it should be said that, you know, by the middle of the 19th century, Riesling had established its reputation worldwide as one of the world's great wines, and it's fascinating if you look at a lot of pre-Prohibition wine lists in the United States, you know, Riesling, and dry Riesling in particular, belongs on par with, you know, the greatest wines of the world that have, you know, kind of emerged into the modern era more successfully as kind of prestige products.

Joan, do you have any other questions there for the time being? There were a few. Just as far as some people were asking temperature-wise, how early should I be taking my wine out before class? That's a fine question. So I would apply the same rule for the sake of these whites and give them, you know, 30 minutes out of the fridge before you start to drink. Fascinatingly enough, your perception of the wine will change as they warm up, so something like acidity will change as they warm up. So something like acidity will change as they warm up. So something like acidity will become more apparent to you as the wine warms up. Something like sugar will equally become more apparent to you as the wine warms up, you know, for better or worse.

But I apply the same half-hour rule for the sake of these wines. And then I had another one. Someone was only able to get their hands on the Château St. Michel dry Riesling. Honest answer, how is it for one of the lower tier wines? Washington State makes quite a bit of wine. That particular project is a collaboration between Château St. Michel. There are a few different, the good doctor Ernie Lussen has, you know, some involvement with Château St. Michel products. It is, you know, as much a commodity as it is a terroir-driven wine, but it's a very well-made wine. You know, I've hung out with the guys that make it. They're good people. You know, there are commodified wines that, you know, I think can contribute to human misery and, you know, kind of push that market in a way that I, you know, regret.

I don't think that's true of Chateau St. Michel. You know, it's not a wine that you can make an intelligent, you know, kind of comparison with for the sake of this vintage of Chateau St. Michel; drinks this way and this vintage drinks another, just because it's constantly a blend. You know, it's a product that they're, you know, looking to engineer year-to-year and establish a certain amount of consistency in. But it's still a really well-made wine and, you know, should be super fun for the sake of this particular exercise. Just to dive a little deeper into the history, prior to again World War I, World War II, almost all Rieslings were mostly dry. Historically, the most prestigious styles were aged in these large neutral oak casks for the better part of a decade before they were ultimately released to the dining public.

Post-World War II, the public's appetite for wine, as well as all sorts of foods, tend to move more in the direction of, you know, kind of sweeter commodities. That's not unique to wine, that's not unique to Riesling, but it just so happened that Riesling became a vessel for that progression. You know, prior to World War I, prior to the 19th century in particular, cane sugar, beet sugar, which was invented in Germany, was very much a luxury. Once people got a taste of it, especially after the leaner years of the Great Depression, they couldn't get enough of it. And because of that, and because Riesling is a grape that wears sugar really well, ultimately the predominant commodified style became sweeter wine.

So the Riesling of popular imagination was not the historically dry Riesling, it was a wine called Leipfermilk, or the most famous instance of which is a wine called Blue Nun, which is something that English men would have been drinking much upon a time. Flash forward to the 1990s, and in Germany there was a movement called the Trockenwein, the dry wave, if you will, and these producers of quality wines throughout the country took a step back and said, you know, maybe we should be producing wine in more historically dry styles, maybe we should try to push the market more in that direction. They have succeeded such that in Germany, in particular, the vast majority of domestic consumption is drier wines now.

And people who love the sweeter wines are even worried that those styles will die out because there's been such a movement toward the drier ones. Lastly, considering the properties of the grape itself, Riesling's a late ripener. It is very cold hardy, it's highly adaptable, and it has this wonderful spectrum of flavors which you can kind of see illustrated here. If, you know, Riesling, you know, was an episode of Bob Ross, you know, the scroll of paints on his palate would be, you know, never-ending. It's got, you know, so many different nuances to it that are, you know, incredibly, you know, wonderful to explore for those of us who love the grape. Now, I want to talk about, for the sake of wine, this whole sugar-acid equation.

The perception of sugar in wine has to do with a lot of different factors. It has to do with measurable sugar, and typically, you know, the wine we're measuring glucose and fructose, which are monosaccharides. The grape yeast Saccharomyces, which is the sugar fungus, ultimately consumes those and converts them into alcohol. It consumes, tends to consume, more glucose than fructose. Fructose is what's left at the end of the fermentation process, by and large. It's called an unfermentable sugar. The more unfermentable sugar you have at the end of the winemaking process, the sweeter the wine will taste. There are other unfermentable sugars in the wine making process. There are other sugars that are left in the mix. There's something called glycerin, which is an alcohol sugar that's apparently less sweet to us than other sugars that's also in the mix.

And then there's this extra dimension of things like oak, which we talked about last time, having this perceptual sweetness to it. And then these more volatile, fruitier flavors in younger wines that contribute to a perception of sweetness, whether or not the wine itself is actually sweet. And much like body is the sum total of acidity, sugar, tannin, and alcohol. Sweetness is the sum total of all of these psychological variables that come into play for the sake of wine. When we're talking about acidity, we're mostly talking about malic and tartaric. Tartaric, more enduring. Riesling is a very acid-driven grape because it has incredibly high amounts of tartaric acid in particular. And the grape vine is unique among grape species, is unique among fruit species, for having higher levels of tartaric acid.

What produces these, you know, alcoholic beverages, that are as enduring as they are, because, you know, that acid, you know, piece of the equation, makes these wines incredibly age-worthy. I wanted to talk over this equation, both in the vineyard and the glass. As grapes ripen, the acid levels tend to go down, and the sugar levels tend to go up. Pretty simple equation. In the glass, they balance concurrently. As the sugar levels rise, your perception of acidity in a wine diminishes. That is to say that the same wine with the same level of acidity will seem less sweet if it's sweeter. So this whole notion of dryness in a wine is very mutable. You could have a wine with let's say four grams per liter of residual sugar, and at one level of acidity, you know, that's seemingly, you know, maybe a slightly sweet wine, but at another level of acidity, it's bone dry, it's unpleasantly dry, and that's well worth understanding for the sake of Riesling because sometimes these wines are so heavy in acidity that they need the sugar to be balanced and elegant. Without further ado, let's move to your first dry wine here. And consider where Riesling does best around the world. Joan, did we have any questions? Yeah, there were a few. Can you share how you feel about Robert Wiest? They had read that his vineyard was started sometime in the 1800s. Robert Wheel is a tremendous producer operating out of the Rheingau. Those are lovely wines. The Rheingau is the historic birthplace of Riesling, within Germany. Those wines, by German standards, tend to be more robust. The Germans talk about them as being more masculine wine.

I apologize for using gendered terms for the sake of wine descriptions. You know, it is a little lazy, but it is occasionally useful as well. But they tend to be wines that are robust, higher in alcohol by German standards, and uniformly dry, but he's a tremendous producer. Serena has a German Riesling and a French Riesling. Is there a big difference in characteristics between these two wines? Well, the Rheingau is a French Riesling. It's a French Riesling. It's a French Riesling. It's a French Riesling. That's a fine question. I'm guessing that her French Riesling, which we'll get to, is probably from Alsace, so that's an excellent segue into the next moment here. So, I love this map.

It shows the bands of latitude and then isotherms, which isotherms show you an average temperature of the course of the year, and grape vines do best between 10 and 20 degrees average temperature Celsius, and you can see that both in the north and in the south. Riesling does better toward the north and the southern extremes of this particular diagram. For the sake of France, you can see that that northern extreme in France is very close to Alsace. And Alsace is in France Riesling central. So Alsace is this little corner of the world right here. You can see all of this corner of southwestern Germany that makes the finest German Rieslings. Should be said, under the Riesling prophecy, Riesling is on the communism, the East Germans really got shafted, they got none of the best wine-making regions, the West Germans made out like bandits there, but Alsace is essentially a continuation of the valley, the Palatinate, the Fultz Valley, into France or vice versa, and Alsatian Rieslings as a whole tend to be cooler in body and dry, although they can be maddeningly inconsistent from vintage to vintage. We've had two questions, can you recommend any Finger Lakes wines and Finger Lakes Rieslings in particular? Absolutely, I can't recommend them highly enough, and I was just trading notes with a winemaker friend from the Finger Lakes about the Australian Riesling on that I'm about to taste for you all here. So Finger Lakes Rieslings wines are absolutely stunning, incredible.

The lakes themselves in Western New York have a mitigating effect on the local climate; they have a lot of water, they have a lot of water, they have a lot of water, they have a lot of heat, so the water retains heat, and Western New York normally would be too cold for grape growing and wine making. But because you have the lakes there, it has this moderating effect on the local climate, and they can make Riesling in particular, a very cold, hardy grape works. Some of my favorite producers include, but are not limited to, one, Kelby Russell's Red Newt; he doesn't get as much credit, especially locally, for the quality of the wines that he makes. Herman Diemer is one of my favorite producers; he's a great wine maker.

He's a great wine maker. He's the gold standard, one of the OGs who first planted and popularized Riesling in the Finger Lakes on Seneca Lake. Konstantin Frank, another OG, Ukrainian immigrant, worked cold weather viticulture in the Soviet Union, came here, worked as a janitor, finally made his way up; it should be a Hollywood movie, somehow it's not yet; they make amazing wines. Good friend Nancy Ireland at Red Tail Ridge, there are too many to mention, honestly. Morton Halgren at Rabin's. It also has this wonderful time warp-like quality, for those of you who have yet to go there, it is a big dairy kind of industry as well, and they make fabulous ice cream, you know. Has this wonderful land that time forgot quality. Geneva is adorable, Ithaca is gorgeous, of course.

It's a fun, it's a fun place, and I, I can't recommend it highly enough. And how long can you cork a Riesling? Oh, that's a fun, a fun, fun question. Riesling's one of those wines that, you know, if you're a wine lover, you can cork, throw in the back of the fridge, forget about for the better part of a month, come back to, and it's better than it was. I like to talk about red wines, you know; having the fragility of the male ego, you know; they give up the ghost really fast once they're opened, you know; Riesling, you know; is more like your grandmother who refused to go to the hospital, you know; it's solid, it's got staying power, not going anywhere for the sake of age-worthiness, it's not going anywhere, even when you cork it and throw it back in the fridge; it's, um, yeah, it's, it's amazing that way, and I find when I forget about it, sometimes I come back to it having forgotten it for weeks, and it's even better.

Um, what age is considered young? Uh, that's a fine question, and a great segue into, um, you guys are feeding me all these segues into, um, uh, my first dry wine. Um, I recommended, uh, several for the sake of, uh, this exercise. We had the Pusey Vale, it's from the Eden Valley of Australia, we can see, uh, that circled right there, um, which is at, like, the 34th parallel, which seemingly would be, uh, very close to the equator for the sake of wine, but, um, it's at very high elevation, so they get great, uh, what's called diurnal shift, so the nighttime low is very low, and that, um, helps maintain acidity in the wines, even though it gets very hot during the day, and then, about to blow your mind here, but it gets so hot during the day that the grapes shut down, um, the grape plant itself, closes its pores and essentially stops its metabolic life, um, and the grapes kind of cease to continue ripening, so, um, when you get that arrested process, you know, you could have, um, a harvest that extends as long as it would in the Finger Lakes, even though it's getting much warmer in a place like Australia. That said, um, Australia is in, um, very much in the crosshairs for the sake of global warming. Um, now, this is a wine that's both really expressive, um, and ragingly acid. Um, uh, the Pusey Vale, um, dates back to the 1830s. Um, these wines date back to the 1960s, which is totally badass for a new world wine. Um, this is all, like, lemon zest and, uh, fresh cut garden hose.

Um, and you know, it's, you know, kind of nerdy and saline and savory, um, but you know, the acidity is such that sometimes it's something you wouldn't want to drink right away. Sometimes these are wines that some time and you want to allow the wine to come into its own and that acidity in particular as a way of settling as the wine ages and it comes off as less bracingly astringent as the wine kind of integrates and comes into its own. Any other queries, Joan? How we doing? It was when storing the white wine, do you have to take the air out of the bottle or can you just simply put the cork back in and put it in the fridge? I would just put the cork back in.

There are people that do that goofy like, you know, pump it up thing. You know, the idea being that you're trying to create a vacuum, you're making a really shitty vacuum for the most part, so you're not really helping rates of oxidation that much. They have these goofy canisters with argon gas or, God forbid, if you have a Coravin, you can use that. A lot of Rieslings are bottled with screw caps. You know, the kids call these, if you want to sound classy, a Stelvin enclosure, but obviously these are uncorvable. It's not worth worrying about, honestly. Riesling, you know, Riesling typically just, if you're just gonna give it a day or two, it's gonna be fine. Don't, don't worry about it. There are other grapes I would worry about a lot more.

Yeah. Your mom asks, when you said nerdy, what did you mean? Complex? Ah, fine question, mom. So, nerdy refers to, you know, for me, it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, obviously. You know, for me, in a wine, honestly, typically refers to something that's a little less approachable. So, you're leading with less of those kind of fruity floral tones and entering this space of, you know, something that's funky or saline. For the sake of Riesling, particularly in warmer climates, that very often comes down to this, like, plastic kind of rubber hose-like aroma. That comes from this chemical constituent called TDN, and people talk about that as petrol or beeswax, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but often it reminds me of, if you're playing along at home, mom, you would burn those rubber belts on your vacuum cleaner, and it smells like that a little bit, or can, but it's a good thing.

You know, that said, it's something that's a bit of an acquired taste that you learn to love, hence the nerdiness. You know, I think it's worth noting that, in life, as in wine, you know, sometimes the things that you come to with time are the things that are most enduring. You know, the first wine that I ever tasted and loved was Turley's Inn. You know, in a moment of weakness, I will still drink the fuck out of some Turley's Inn, but, you know, it's not a wine that, you know, I want to settle down with and marry, you know. You know, that's more of a, like, a, you know, a first fling of sorts. You know, the wines for me that are more enduring are the ones that you, you know, come to understand.

Um, better over time, that you want to spend time with that, you know, reveal themselves, unspool more slowly. Um, sorry, Christian, to profane your virgin ears, sir. Um, at any rate, um, for the sake of this, uh, Aussie Riesling, uh, it's crystal clear, um, which makes sense, because it's a 2008, um, you know, on the nose, um, I'm getting a little bit of, you know, that kind of, like, petrol-y kick, but for me, these wines are, like, all lime zest. They're all lime zest and sea spray, and, uh, they're super fun that way, and then, you know, the, the palate is, like, zippy, um, and, you know, joyful. You know, there's just exuberance, um, about these wines, and, you know, sometimes to, you know, put too fine a point on it or to, like, weigh them down with adjectives just, you know, kind of diminishes them.

Just, like, just drink it, you know, have fun with it. You know, that's, that's what I love, um, about, about Riesling. It just kind of, um, you know, it, it, it asks for the best, I find. I, um, one of my wine heroes, Paul Greco, um, of Terroir, in New York, says that, uh, drinking Riesling makes you a better person, um, and, and I think there is some truth to that. Um, so without further ado, let's move on, uh, to the German side of the ledger, um, uh, and this is, uh, should be said, uh, one of my favorite, uh, visual aids, um, uh, that, uh, um, you know, I brought into the mix. So, um, German wine, again, is maddening. These are Riesling grapes at various states of ripening.

Um, so Riesling, a white grape, um, uh, as it ripens, um, takes on this wonderful kaleidoscopic, set of hues, and each of these, uh, grapes get, uh, progressively more concentrated and laden with sugar, which is significant because the Germans, uh, classify their wine, um, uh, as the outgrowth of a much reviled 1971, uh, German wine law. Uh, they classify their wines in terms of ripeness level of the grapes at harvest. So, um, for those of you playing along at home, for my staff playing along at home, uh, they've heard me say this a million times, but I'm going to beat a dead horse, uh, because it's kind of hard to wrap your head around. Um, throughout the world, they tend to classify their wine by sight.

Uh, it harkens back to this French notion of terroir. The idea being in a place like Chablis that we tasted, uh, through the, uh, through last week, the greatest sites, the Premier Cruise, the Grand Cruise, they encompass a unique set of geographical conditions that lead to greatness in the resultant wines. The Germans said, you know, we are at the northern edge of this grape growing realm, and for us, quality is less about these, you know, individual sites, even though the Germans had and very much do have sites that are more noble than others. But the German bureaucrats who were founding the system got together and said, the key criteria for us in quality is ripeness. And so they tend to classify the top tier of German wines, which are called Prädikatzweins, according to ripeness level of the grapes at harvest.

And the first three tiers, which are mostly dry wines, are Kabinett, Spätlese, and Auslese. You can see the pyramid here. You have the, at the base of that pyramid, Cabernet, Spätlese, and Auslese. Fun mnemonic device for the sake of that one, kick some ass. Sorry again, Christian Connor. But if you're looking at these grapes, you can kind of see here, these would be grapes that are plucked for a Cabernet level wine. So they are ostensibly fully ripe, but they have more malic acid in the mix. Malic actually comes from the Latin word for apple. And they have more of a green apple kind of flavor in the mix. Then moving on to the second tier, these grapes in the middle, these correspond more to the Spätlese level of ripeness.

Spätlese in German means late harvest. Historically, it corresponded to a set of wines that came about when a bishop forgot to notify his peasants that they should harvest. And two weeks later, they did, and a beautiful accident was born. But in the modern context, it connotes a slightly sweeter wine than Cabernet, with more fruity, kind of like tropical flavors, because the grapes are riper. And then Auslese corresponds to these grapes that had started to redden, started to shrivel on the vine. Auslese means select harvest. And once you get to this point, you're making multiple passes through the vineyard and selecting the ripest clusters. It's not the case that grapes in the vineyard ripen evenly. Typically, you know, they'll ripen cluster by cluster, or even within a given cluster.

And to make a really, you know, profound Auslese wine, you're going to want to pluck the ripest grapes to go into it. Those are the wines that can be made dry, although they're not always. And then you get into the dessert wines, which encompass the ever-popular Barron Auslese, which is a select berry harvest. And then the Trocken Barron Auslese, which is the select dried berry harvest at the other tier there. And you can see those grapes look like they barely contain any sugar at all. The yields are incredibly small. The alcohol levels are relatively low. And the wines are incredibly sweet. But because Riesling maintains all that wonderful tartaric acidity in particular, those are wines that are balanced in spite of that sweetness. And again, you know, we are always dealing with this sense of tension.

On the one hand, on one side of the seesaw, you have sugar. On the other side of the seesaw, you have acidity. And as long as those balance out, the wine will be everything that you want it to be, which is a great segue into our map of Germany. Joan, hit me with questions. Yeah. Can we consider Austrian and German Rieslings more or less siblings? That is an excellent question. You would think so, because you know, they're both Germanic and Austrians in their own way, occasionally more severe even than the Germans, although the food is way better, it should be said in Austria than it is in Germany. At any rate, Austrian Rieslings tend to be drier. Riesling occupies a much smaller kind of a sliver of the Austrian white wine market.

The Austrian grape of choice on the white side of the ledger is Grüner Veltliner. Belt leaner. Riesling accounts for a much smaller percentage of the plantings than it does in Germany, and Austrian Rieslings are, in the modern era, almost uniformly dry. That tends to be true of Riesling outside of Germany in general. In Australia, in the Finger Lakes, in Washington State, in Ontario, Canada, where they make amazing Riesling and Pinot, in British Columbia, where they make amazing Riesling and Pinot, in all of these different parts of the Riesling world, you know, the wines tend to be drier than, you know, they, you know, are throughout Germany. Germany encompasses the greatest diversity of styles. And we're going to move on to, for the sake of Spätlese, I'm very lucky. I have Spätlese from Mr. Harold Hexamer. He is in the Naha region of Germany, which you can see circled here, and this is a 2007 Spätlese. It should be noted that we're going from a wine for the sake of the Pussy Gale, that has about 12% alcohol, to something for the sake of the Hexamer offering that's closer to 7.5. So, you know, as that alcohol goes down, there's more of that sugar that is unfermented left in the glass for you to taste. Riesling is, you know, among the most age-worthy wines in the world. This is stupid good. You can tell the age in the glass. It's got more of a golden hue. These wines, as they age, tend to darken, both white and red. Occasionally, Riesling, as it gets older, will develop what are called wine diamonds, or tartaric crystals.

The tartaric acid will precipitate out at the bottom of the bottle, and you'll get these goofy little, you know, crystals that are totally edible, and are essentially cream of tartar. But, at any rate, that is another indication of wine age in a wine like this. What else do you have for me, Jen? Yeah, after drinking a glass of the dry, the sweet tastes less sweet. Is that normal? It's an excellent question. It could be that the dry wine is just so acid-driven that you have this residual acidity left in the mix on your palate that is further cutting through the sugar on the wine that you're tasting thereafter. I find typically that, you know, something sweet will taste sweeter after trying something dry, and conversely, something that's dry will taste drier after tasting something sweet.

The last part of this exercise that I will, you know, release you all into now is tasting through these, both of these wines with your food. So, taste the dry wine, taste the sweet wine with something salty, with something kind of fatty, with something tart and something spicy. And, you know, for each of those flavor profiles, you know, think about whether, you know, do I prefer, you know, the dry wine, you know, or do I prefer the sweet one, you know, and then on its own, do I like this sweet wine better, you know, maybe on its own, but, you know, with something spicy, I prefer the sweet wine. And it is the case that with something spicy, I've got, you know, this like fermented chili paste on my board.

A sweet wine will mitigate the heat there in a way that works ever so beautifully with spicier dishes. Is there any truth to the idea that the Alsatian Rieslings are more floral than others? You know, I wouldn't give the Alsatians, you know, you know, a stranglehold over florality. In Riesling, I think they can be incredible wines. You know, very often they're getting fuller ripeness, you know, or at least ripeness at a higher alcohol, because Alsace within France actually gets a ton of sun. It's almost as much sun as Marseille along the Mediterranean coast. It actually gets more sun than Marseille in Colmar. So you get this like really like full fruitiveness to the wines there. It's just kind of a different kind of wine.

It's a bit of aromatic intensity, I think, you know, as opposed to, you know, being more or less one than the other. When storing wines, do the sweet Rieslings last longer or do they both last just as long after opening? Ooh, this is a very good question. And the verdict is somewhat out. There are some people that would say that, you know, without regard to the individual offering, the sweeter wine will age better. But ageability in wine, you know, like perceptual sweetness in a wine, is typically about the confluence of multiple factors. So it's not just the sugar. It's the acidity. It's the alcohol. It's the quality of the winemaking. It's how much sulfur the wine is dosed with at bottling.

You know, so there's too much going on there to say, you know, you know, without, you know, and that the sweet wine will age better than the other. So I think that's a good point. And then the drier one. Great. Excellent. So, you know, it is worth understanding for the sake of the German offerings that, you know, very often the sweetness level in the finished wine does correspond to a sweetness level for the sake of a style. So I also have a Cabernet Riesling from Harold Hexamer, one of my wine heroes. It should be said that Germany, in addition to making some of the greatest Rieslings in the world, is cartoonishly beautiful. So, you can see Harold presiding over his vineyard in the Naha there. And he's kind of in the lower reaches of the Naha.

And the vineyards are precipitously steep in that section. So I have a Cabernet wine here as well. And a Cabernet tends to be a little less sweet because, you know, we're dealing with those slightly greener grapes. It tends to be, you know, crisper, more astringent, cleaner than the Spätlese. The Spätlese is more tropical. It's fuller-fruited, the Auslese, you know, sweeter and, you know, more hedonistic still. And occasionally there'll be grapes afflicted with noble rot in the mix there as well, which will add another layer of honeyed complexity. That said, there are some modifying words that Germans will use to indicate the final sweetness. So some of you reached out to me, and you had Cabernet Trocken. Any time you see the Trocken appended to the end of the description of a wine in Germany, you are dealing with something that has been fermented fully dry.

So whether you have a Cabernet Trocken or a Spätlese Trocken, you're dealing with a wine that finishes dry. You know, that says nothing about the classification. Because, again, it's a wine. That's derived from this ripeness level at harvest, not at the end of the winemaking process. So Trocken equals dry. Then there are a couple other words that are, you know, equally confusing but, you know, worth knowing, being Halbtrocken, which is kind of self-evident. Trocken's dry, Halb is half. So Halbtrocken is, you know, kind of mostly dry, you know, in the Princess Bride, mostly dead sense of the terminology. So Halbtrocken is insidiously sweet. And then the Germans have another term that's not regulated under law. It's Feinherb. And Feinherb literally means kind of like finely bitter.

But they apply to a set of wines that roughly corresponds to the Halbtrockens in the mix. So these are wines that, you know, aren’t fully dry. But, you know, again, are mostly dry. And it can be a really fun place to land for this wine. For the sake of Riesling. Because that added little bit of sugar makes the wines infinitely more versatile in terms of the kinds of dishes that they go with. If you all are, you know, kind of tasting any things and coming up with some amazing pairings, please let me know via the chat window. You know, conversely, if you’re surprised about what does and doesn’t work with individual wines, be they dry or sweet, just let me know. You know.

A big part of this exercise, hopefully, is about creating this, you know, aha moment that sweetness in and of itself is not a bad thing. You know, we talk about sweetness in wine being profane or somehow tacky. Yet, you know, we'll drink a Coke or, God forbid, a Diet Coke and not think twice about it. You know. So, you know, it's all arbitrary. And sweetness in wine can be hugely useful. And hugely beneficial. And hugely useful when we're dealing with food and wine as well. And, you know, to the extent that you're enjoying Riesling, don't get hung up on this trap of only enjoying one style or another. You know, the beauty of Riesling is that there is so much out there, ultimately, to be enjoyed.

And, you know, I encourage you all to have fun with that. So, I'm going to close here with a bit of a recap. Some well wishes. And then one more kind of just little bit of wisdom from Jancis Robinson. So, considering German wine, this is a quote that my dad sent along to me. Thank you, Pops. It comes from Karen McNeil who said, the best German wines are, in many ways, what all wine aspires to be. An expression of a fruit so vivid and pure that it is lifted up out of the ponderous corporal world of humanity. And becomes a spiritual experience. And I think that circles back, you know, to the poem we opened with. That whole notion of what a lovely sack of stars.

You know, Riesling as a spiritual experience, you know, feels fitting given that we're coming up on Passover and Easter. But, you know, I think it certainly can transform our workaday life and become something more. It doesn't have to. But, you know, it's worth drinking, you know, for both sets of experiences. So, for the sake of this exercise, you know, we've considered sweetness in these wines using Riesling as a lens. And tried to understand how our perception of sweetness changes depending on other factors in the wine, chiefly the acidity. And tried to develop a fuller appreciation of ultimately, you know, how different styles of Riesling go with different types of food. I'll open this up to questions again after we close out. But I wanted to offer our customary toast.

And that today is also to a birthday girl in the mix. If you're listening along here, I want to wish a special happy birthday to one Allie Thorburn. Allie is our amazing beverage director at The Tail of the Goat. And she, along with everyone at both restaurants, is enduring this crisis with amazing wine. We are so lucky to have you guys. And, you know, even more excited to reopen our doors whenever we are able. Happy birthday to you, Allie. Equally, for the sake of Passover, Shag Shemayach. Sorry, my Hebrew needs a little work. But Shag Shemayach for all you Goyim in the mix. Happy Palm Sunday. And lastly, of course, to everyone here drinking alone together. Cheers. Lots of questions, bell, Johnny. All right.

Would you please delve into the nuances speaker and BHA us these variations with some more examples of profile differentiation and comparable New World wines once you get into the, you know, kind of barren Auslese so it's just kind of noble select harvest and trucking Barossa and also a sort of noble dried berry harvest, you're getting into the realm of dessert wines. So those are wines that it's impossible to ferment to full dryness. So any comparable style would be a comparable style of dessert wine. So, you know, in other parts of the old world, they had things like Sauternes, they had things like, you know, Tokaji, you know, so there are a myriad styles. Now, it should be noted that those two criteria are distinct from ice wine.

Ice wine is kind of like a separate entity entirely, but at the top of the pyramid, ultimately you're just dealing with, you know, grapes that are harvested for the sole purpose of making a dessert wine. You mentioned the word noble rot. What does that mean? Ah, fine question. So to say that there's a noble rot naturally acknowledges that most rot is ignoble. So noble rot is a fungus called Botrytis. Botrytis is a fungus called Botrytis cinerea that prevails throughout the vineyard and it takes multiple forms. It can either attack the grapes and rot them on the vine, it's called black rot, which is, you know, what everyone is familiar with for the sake of a moldy peach.

But occasionally, if conditions are right, if there's enough moisture, but not so much that the grapes start to develop black rot, then you get a set of conditions that develop, that basically sets the grapes up for the vineyard. So that's why it's called Botrytis cinerea, for a premature death. So the fungus attacks the grapes, but not so far as to render them inevitably edible, just so far as to force the plant to kind of devote its energy to, you know, its own survival and leaves the grapes to wither on the vine. And they develop a really unique set of kinds of funkier, honeyed flavors that people widely celebrate. The most famous noble rot wine in the world being Sauternes. But there are certainly famous noble rot wines derived from Riesling as well.

Why are the bottles narrow? Ah, fine question. So this gets back to the first tier on our quality pyramid of German wine, you know, quality under the Friday Cotswine system, Cabernet. So Cabernet, historically, actually referred to a set of reserve wines, because in Germany, your proudest wines would have been stored in a, wait for it, cabinet. So Cabernet meant 'reserve' because, you know, you would throw your bottles down in a cabinet. And as such, you know, the Germans being masters of efficiency, wanted something with a sleek kind of profile for the sake of that environment. Furthermore, you know, they kind of look cool. They pour better than a lot of other bottles. You can also tell within Germany, where a wine is from regionally, in the Mosel Valley, these bottles have green glass.

Outside the Mosel, as do all of these bottles, they have brown glass. They're called Hock bottles after Hockheim, which is in the Rheingau. And they have been adopted by pretty much every other recent producer in the world, just out of convention. The dry Jim Berry Lodge Hill isn't so great with foods compared to the Francine Cabernet. Why would a sweeter Riesling pair better with sour, sweet, spicy, etc.? That is an excellent question. And for me, it has everything to do with mouthfeel. So, you know, that sweetness gives a wine weight, gives it heft. And in as much as, you know, we talk about individual, you know, tasting notes on these wines, that textural experience of a wine is even more important for the sake of pairing it with something like food.

And, you know, that weight that the sugar gives the wine gives it, you know, power and balance when it's confronted with something like food. And then for the sake of spicy, it's important to understand that spicy is not an individual variable, like bitter, sour, salty, sweet, for the sake of our taste buds. Spicy is like a short-circuiting of the system. It's like Pee-wee's Playhouse, the couches are freaking out here, guys. Like everything's firing all at once. Sweetness just tempers the heat. It short-circuits the heat. It, you know, kind of diffuses the hot bomb as it, as it were, in a way that a dry wine can't, because acidity alone actually amps up the perception of spiciness in addition. Got it. Can you talk a little bit about sparkling Rieslings?

Ooh, let's talk about sect, baby. I'm sorry, everyone, for that pun. Ali hopefully enjoyed it. So, sparkling Riesling is called Sekt. And, that is an obscure historical reference. At any rate, sparkling Riesling is amazing. Most of it doesn't make it stateside. Typically, it is made the same way, or the good ones are made the same way that champagne is. It's worth understanding that the lifeblood of sparkling wine is acidity. We've beaten that horse to death today, but obviously Riesling's got a lot of it. And so, it works really well in sweeter wines. Some of my favorite Riesling experiences have been drinking Riesling as a fizzy wine. Seek it out, ask for it. Let's all try to make sec't, you know, happen, you know, provided it's safe.

But, at any rate, you know, nobody's going to reflexively recommend it. You know, it's not something that you're typically going to find on an average wine list. You know, it's something that you're going to kind of have to, you know, seek out for yourself. All right. So, are there any, talking about blind tastings, are there any specific tells that you can talk about when you're talking about France versus German versus U.S. Rieslings? That is an excellent, excellent question. So, I think weight, body, would be the first. So, Germany, almost uniformly, is a cooler, has a, encompasses a cooler set of growing regions than either Alsace or most of the places that make good Riesling in stateside.

It's much easier to talk in terms of flavor profiles for German and Alsatian wines than it is Americans because we've had less time to develop those flavor profiles and to, you know, kind of, you know, fully define that notion of terroir. For the sake of German wines, there is no one, German Riesling flavor profile. There are multiple German Riesling flavor profiles that correspond to different growing regions within the country. So, as you go from North to South in Germany, stylistically, you tend to go from wines that are lower in alcohol and more, again, apologies, delicate, feminine, maybe sweeter, to ones that are more robust, fuller bodied, more savory and masculine. So, you know, a wine from the Moselle Valley will be more filigreed and delicate and floral.

Something from the Naha will be, you know, more robust, a steelier, stonier, something that's from the Pfalz will, you know, be more voluptuous and, you know, broader shouldered. Alsace is, on this map, right below the Pfalz, essentially. And it is very warm, as I spoke to earlier. Those wines are broader shouldered still, fuller in body. Alsace is hugely fascinating, though, because there are a myriad of soil types in Alsace. It's geologically, you know, hugely fascinating if you really want to dive deep into wine nerdery. And because of that, there's this like polyglot of styles from Alsace for the sake of, especially the great wines, the Grand Cru's, and it's a really interesting place to taste wine, because in this like relatively narrow corner of the world, you have these styles that, you know, vary tremendously, even though, you know, people are making wine in roughly the same manner.

But broadly speaking, they tend to be bigger, fuller-fruited, and drier than the German counterparts. In the Finger Lakes, I know this is a really long answer to this question, but it's a good question. In the Finger Lakes, the growing season is compressed. It's actually, the extremes are extreme, if that makes sense. So it gets colder in the Finger Lakes than it ever would in the old world, but it also gets hotter during the summer. So the growing season is kind of like shrunk. So they start a little later typically with bud break, flowering, fruit set, et cetera. But they make that time up because it gets hotter throughout the growing cycle. That typically gives wines that are, you know, even a little more tropically fruited than their Alsatian counterparts, but they lean more Alsatian than German.

So that's that. With climate change, which countries do you think will be continued to be able to grow Riesling grapes? Germany is actually a big climate change winner. Historically, you know, in any given year, for the sake of climate change in Germany, you know, you would have, you know, some vintages where you make a decent wine, but you'd have other vintages where you make a ton of seconds because you wouldn't want to make a non-fizzy wine out of things. Or you'd have to do, you'd have to add sugar, which is commonly called chaptalizing, and people do that to add weight to wines. That's something they still allow even in really good German wines, just because you're far enough north that sometimes you don't get enough sugar in the grapes to make a wine that has the kind of weight that you wanted.

Or occasionally, they will add a company called Süs Reserve. Süs Reserve is filtered, unfermented grape musk that's added after the fact. As a corrective, kind of like dosage in champagne. So that got very nerdy for all of you at home, but hopefully the questioner benefited from it. But Germany's far enough north that, you know, even as it warms, you know, they've struck upon more reliable ripening. You know, there are places like Australia where it's harder to forestall ripening and, you know, conditions in the vineyard get so hot that they actually had started to use betonite clay. In Australia, it looks like sunscreen. So if you ever watched tennis and saw like Patrick Rafter wear that like white stuff on his cheeks, basically they do that for the grapes.

You know, when they're anticipating, you know, you know, heat waves. Because otherwise, they'd get scorched. You know, so the regions where you're already getting overripe recently, those are the ones that are most at danger. But they're also litigating circumstances, so it's hard to make first generalizations. What are the regulations for producers having to put sweetness levels on the wines? Is it optional? It is totally optional, which is, you know, I know, which is maddening. It is totally optional, both stateside and on the continent. That said, when you see a drop of German wine that's labeled Trocken or Halbtrocken, to label a wine that way corresponds to a set of scientific criteria for the wine. So if the German wine says Trocken, then the relevant German bureaucrats are stamping it as Trocken or what have you.

So it means something if you see those labels on the wines, but they're not required to be there. There is an effort to change that. There is an international Riesling kind of form that has set up these criteria for back labels on Riesling that gives a sweetness for them. But again, you know, again, it's not enforced. So you never really know unless you're in on the joke. But again, you know, Riesling connoisseurs are kind of like, you know, the jazz obsessives searching for like that great 45, that, you know, some obscure record shop. Like, they're okay with that. You know, it's just like, you know, it's a nerdy thing. You know, sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn't. You know, c'est la vie. Can you make some Passover wine recommendations?

I know, so it should be red. I don't know much about the kosher wine scene. I'm deeply sorry. My colleague who I celebrated earlier, Ali, was actually headed to Israel prior to the pandemic outbreak. So I don't know, Ali, if you want to chime in. There's actually really good kosher wine out there. There's a lot of really good kosher wine, it should be said. I don't know much about it. That said, I don't know how people do it, but I can't, other than red, I can't give any intelligent recommendations. Denny wants to say it doesn't need to be kosher. It doesn't need to be kosher. Oh, okay. Okay. All right. All right. All right. I don't know. I mean, like I know lamb is a big thing on the Passover table.

So, and it's still cold enough that I want something, maybe meatier, more robust like Syrah, is a great lamb wine. Syrah is kind of cool because it does a little bit of everything. You have like Aussie Shiraz, that appeals to people that like these big, full-fruited monsters. Then you have like classic Northern Rhone Syrah. That's like, you know, dank and like smoky. Smoky and meaty and super fun, um, you know a lot of southern-run reds, uh, work well, um, to that end. You know I like wines that kind of like brambly, um, Rioja, I think is a fun wine for a lot of people who like different things, um, and you can get Rioja with a little bit of age to it that seesome oak which people also like if you're working for a crowd.

Um, I was going to make a, uh, if you're hosting Seder for a dozen, kind of, uh, quick, but I don't think anyone is hosting Seder for a dozen, so, um, get something that pleases you. Um, yeah, um, what's the biggest difference between new world versus old world Rieslings, other than the German classification? That's an excellent, uh, question again. Um, I'm falling into my old old trope, uh, and yes they are all excellent questions, um, I'm just, uh, you know. Thrilled to be in a position of of answering them, um, at any rate, uh, typically with like other wines, so Syrah that I just gave as an example, you know, there is an old wine, old world, new world, uh, divide.

So, you can safely say that old world Syrah, you know, you know it has a more classically old world flavor profile, uh, they're more acid driven, they lead a little less with fruit, uh, they're wines that are meant to be enjoyed in the context of the table, whereas Aussie, sure as you know um, California Syrah, you know, they're plusher wines that are, you know, kind of standalone entities. Riesling is almost inherently an old world grape, you know. if you love riesling you love acid you know you can never make riesling sure ass it just doesn't really do that you know you can say that you know uh people in the new world you know generally do work more with stainless steel and generally do prefer a fruitier flavor profile but riesling is always going to be a creature of the old world which is honestly one of my favorite things about it um can you what meal that you serve at your home would you pair with riesling um all the meals um you know riesling i was such a cop out um you know i do truly believe that there is a riesling for any and all occasion and uh you know any you know Kind of type of food that you would want to throw at it? Um, there's actually uh, there's a great restaurant outside of Tampa called Burn the Steakhouse, and they have this amazing cellar. And there are these like steak obsessives that love to go to Burns and drink like these thick steaks with old-ass German Riesling, which sounds like a weird pairing but like dry-aged meat has some of the you know same funkiness that old oak place it does in a really kick-ass way.

And like the weight of the wine can match the weight of the steak. Um, so there truly is a reason for anything I typically tend to think more, more in terms of like What do I want to do with the dish so you know something is more delicate and interesting and like more like you. So if John's playing with, like, scallop crudo or a lighter crudo dish, you know, then, you know, a lighter, more delicate dry Riesling or something that's high-tracking could be really delightful with that. You know, if we're dealing with a fuller-flavored dish, then, you know, maybe I want to try something Alsatian that's, you know, a little more broad-shouldered, has more meat on its bones, you know, or something from the Finger Lakes.

You know, I think having fun with sugar in wine for the sake of pairings is just, like, really great, too. You know, we talked over, you know, well, for Passover, it kind of has to be a red wine. But, you know, if you were, you know, going, if you, you know, alongside your four glasses had a bottle of Riesling, you know, something that was off-dry with the land could be fabulous. You know, it could be super fun. Something like this older Spätlese I'm drinking would be really fun with land. You know, so it's just, you know, it's one of those wines that's super, you know, gratifying to play around with food. Because, you know, often I find myself surprised at what works. What soil is best for Rieslings? Ah, great question.

So, Riesling is very terroir, expressive. So, Riesling is this amazing prism through which to understand how and why, you know, a wine is what it is and, you know, what condition you shaped it in the vineyard. The classic terroirs for Riesling are slate. So, you know, you can see Harold here is overlooking this massive slate, gray slate outcropping, overlooking the Naha, which itself is a tributary of the Rhine. There's much more kind of polyglot of soils in the Naha than other parts of Germany. But the Riesling of classic imagination, especially from the Mosel Valley in Germany, comes from slate. So slate is a type of sedimentary and the metamorphic rock that is layers upon layers of soil, compacted, stratified. And it's really hard to, for the roots of the vine to penetrate.

But Riesling's a bit like a donkey. It likes, you know, really, you know, challenging conditions. It's very drought resistant. So usually the poor, the soil, the better it is for Riesling and that can just like take a lot of, you know, a lot of different kinds of poor soil. But Riesling is a grape that doesn't, doesn't do, you can make decent Riesling on more fertile soils and it's very forgiving that way. But the best examples come from like, you know, places that you wouldn't even think you could plant anything in. You had said broad shouldered. What does that mean? That's just a nerdy psalm speak for more bodied. You know, something that's kind of fleshed out, you know, has more weight to it on the palate. However, you kind of come to experience that individually.

Can you speak a little bit more on the petrol aroma? Yes. That's hugely fascinating. So the petrol constituent, and again, there's a chemical, there's been a lot of, I know this sounds, you know, ridiculously nerdy. Why not just enjoy the wine and not belabor it? But I am one of those people that, you know, finds the thing itself more enjoyable. You know, when you understand more fully the underpinnings. A chemical constituent called TDN that creates that. And it tends to develop in Riesling as it ripens in warmer places, but it also develops as the Riesling ages. So wines like Riesling as they age, they kind of shed some of that prettier floral fruity, you know, set of chemical constituents. And they take on something else entirely, which is, you know, greasier, you know, more savory.

You know, it has this, it smells like gasoline. People say petrol because it sounds, you know, English and more noble, but it's like a gas station. It just does. Or people say beeswax, whatever, you know, adjective you want to throw at it. It's, you know, it's impolite, but it becomes, you know, strangely pleasant once you get used to it. And, you know, that's something that Riesling can possess in its youth, but tends to develop, you know, develop as it kind of sheds that veil of pretty fruitiness and, you know, settles into its more kind of cantankerous old age, you know, but, you know, like, you know, like the cool grandfather, you know, like the, like he's cantankerous, but in an entertaining kind of way. Can you talk a little bit more about residual sugars?

I can see them on the glass, not sure how it relates to the legs. Excellent question. So higher levels of, so again, this whole notion of residual sugar in wine, there are all sorts of different types of sugar in wine, glucose and fructose, which we spoke to earlier being the two most important. And those are variously consumed by yeast throughout the fermentation process, but the yeast themselves can never consume all the sugars. They're always left over, unfermentable sugars in the mix. And, you know, typically they are anywhere from, you know, one to three to four grams of sugar per liter in a dry wine. And, you know, anything above that, anything that's left over above that we call residual because we can experience it. So typically people only talk in terms of residual sugar in sweet wines.

You could have a Riesling that has like, you know, nine, 10, 15, 20 grams per liter and tastes dry because the acid is so raging. And even though the sugar levels are so pronounced, people typically wouldn't talk in terms of residual sugar in that wine. It's just, you know, sugar. There's nothing residual about it because the wine still tastes dry. It is the case though that, you know, that added grams per liter will give a wine viscosity that it wouldn't have otherwise. So that extra sugar will act the same way that alcohol does. And in the glass, give the wine the legs that you spoke to. Lots of questions about class for next week. Lots of requests as well for. I don't know.

I felt a little, you know, I was thinking weird about, you know, interrupting Easter dinner slash, you know, any, you know, residual Passover celebration. But at any, at any rate, I feel like, you know, that's not happening as much because people are still stuck at home. But I was thinking about, it should be said, I was thinking about Pinot Noir as a topic. What are the suggestions, Joni? Georgian wine. That's a big push for that. Who knows? My only, I would love to do that. My only, there's not a lot of, to the commenter who suggested Georgian Pinot, there's not a lot of Georgian Pinot out there. I want to, wherever people are, be it in the DMV or, or, you know, elsewhere, wanting to, you know, kind of set topics around things that are attainable.

And, you know, those who know me know that I have a deep reverence for Georgian wine. Georgia is, you know, mother's milk. It is the birthplace of, the grape varietal, which goes into all wines. But it is not the easiest, subset of wines to obtain, at, you know, even liquor stores here. So that's, that would, you know, be my, you know, kind of, hesitant, hesitancy. Lots of requests for class next week. It's just on a different day. Oh, okay. On a different day. Yeah, we could, we could definitely, we could do that. That's, that's an excellent, I can make that happen. And then, could you talk a little bit about South African wines, or a few inquiries about that? Oh, cool. Yeah, so South Africa, is really, is, so A, South Africa, South Africa is cartoonishly beautiful.

There's a long history of winemaking there. The grape of choice, on the white side of the ledger, historically, was what they called Steen, which the west of the world knew as Chenin Blanc, which is another very high acid grape, not as high acid as Riesling, because nothing's as high acid as Riesling, but Chenin is, you know, amazing, beautiful. South Africa, fascinatingly, is, a global warming, kind of, winner, because you kind of can't see it here, but, there are these currents that like whip up, from, Antarctica, on either side of South Africa, and, ensure, the, like they moderate the climate there. So, a lot of the studies that I've read about global warming indicate that South Africa is one of the regions that will be less affected.

They work with, you know, South African wine honestly is an amazing value. I find, I think, you know, relative to what you get in the bottle, relative to what's available, commercially at a lot of liquor stores, you know, I would more often than not, rather reach for something South African, than something, you know, South American, no offense, to any South Americans in the mix, but, you know, it's, it's a fun, it's a fun place. They don't, there isn't a ton of Riesling there, as far as, as far as I know, I'm sure there's somebody working with Riesling there, because people are working with it everywhere, but, typically the high acid white of choice is Sherry. A lot of requests actually for Sherry, for the next class. For Sherry? Yep.

Can you suggest any sects that we should keep our eyes out for, that are available in the DC area? The most, the most widely available one, commercially, is the Dr. L, from the aforementioned Ernst Lucien, and that hails from the Fultz, and it retails for under $20. It's a good wine, you know, he makes a ton of it, but it's, it's a good wine. Crap, who makes, I mean, the other ones would be more boutique-y. Dr. Dinehart, might be somewhat available, is a really killer wine. You know, everybody, a lot of the people that make great, you know, still Rieslings make great Sekt. Johannes Selbach makes amazing Sekt. At that point, it's more about finding Sekt than anything else.

So I would, you know, try to think in terms of a liquor store that, you know, carries, you know, a good smattering of German and Austrian wines, which is a difficult niche because, you know, you're looking for more classic German Austrians. And MacArthur does a little bit of that. The Weigandt guys do. Domestique does, but most of their stuff is nerdier. But they, they might have some Sekt as well. Or, or actually Petnat. They would have some like recent Petnat stuff there, which could be fun. Favorite vineyard in the DMV? Individual vineyard. Oh, nope. Yeah. Yeah. Favorite vineyard in the DMV. Wow. Um, maybe not because of the wines or not. I mean, the wines are great just because I've spent more time there is, is hardscrabble, which is Jim Law's, um, uh, home base.

Um, it's an old apple farm. Um, and it's, it's, you know, boutique-y and just adorable. And, um, you know, I've been there in snow. I've been there at the height of summer. It's always stunningly beautiful. It's always everything that you want a vineyard experience to be. And just this like homey community of wine lovers. And I love that about it. Barbaresco is more grand and Luca makes a shit ton of wine there, but it's kind of cool. The, um, former, it's named after the former Virginia governor, James Barber, um, and the ruins of his estate, um, which were designed by Thomas Jefferson are there. So just as kind of like a physical property. Um, that's really cool to visit too.

Um, can you go by alcohol level to determine the sweetness, um, or roughly, or if the label doesn't give it to you roughly? Yeah, typically the lower, typically as a rule on a recently lower alcohol, the more leftover sugar, uh, in the wine. So, um, you know, if we're going to use my wines, for example, as a case in point, um, uh, my, uh, Australian Riesling, which is bone bone dries at 12% alcohol. Um, my cabinet, uh, Riesling, um, which is, uh, ragingly acid and kind of, uh, blurry, uh, and, and sweet, um, is at 8%. And then my spate laces at seven and a half. So, you know, you know, for a fact, if you're getting under, um, you know, 10% alcohol, you're dealing with something that's going to be sweet.

And then typically the lower you go, the sweeter you're talking for the sake of wine. Um, I think it's the last question that I have. Why are so many wines called 'Doctor'? Oh, that's an excellent, there are a lot. Uh, that's, that's an excellent question. So there are just a shit ton of doctors in the German wine pantheon, which I, um, find endlessly, uh, entertaining and fun. Um, it should be said that, um, you know, the Germans are like hugely rigorous, uh, in, um, you know, wine making as in other walks of life. Um, there is a school of German wine making at Geisenheim. Um, which is the premier, one of the premier, um, schools of wine making in the old world.

Um, and, you know, pretty much everybody who makes wine in Germany, um, uh, on the production side, um, uh, goes there and a lot of them, um, get doctorates, you know, um, either the, the German educational model is different. It's more of like an apprenticeship system and you don't go to college for as long. Um, it's actually really cool at Geisenheim because you're required to work in a winery. Um, uh, but, you know, if you want to tack on a few years, then you can get a doctorate, uh, type of thing. Great. Um, so just lots of requests for a red for next week and then the date will be debatable. The last request, um, was for us to all be unmuted and sing happy birthday to Ali. Oh, yeah.