10 Reasons You Should Give Riesling Another Look

No other wine has been the object of such devoted campaigning, proselytizing and ardor as riesling.

What has been the result of all that fervor? Yawns, mostly.

According to Nielsen, retail sales of riesling in the United States have dropped over the last few years, though they shot upward over the first two-and-a-half months of the pandemic, outperforming sales of wine as a whole during that time.

Riesling seems to be one of those wines, like Loire reds, that do not seem to move consumers in the way wine writers assume and hope, no matter how impassioned the promise that it takes only one sip to become a convert.

Perhaps it’s confusion: Is riesling sweet? Is it dry? How can you tell?

The glory of riesling’s versatility is paradoxically both a strength and a commercial weakness. Its capacity to make complex, thrilling dry wines as well as luscious yet refreshing sweet wines is unmatched. But in a world that prefers simple messaging, riesling’s spectrum of possibilities may be confounding.

This is compounded by a general fear of sweet wines. For too long in the mid-20th century, riesling was associated with cheap, bland German sweet wines like Blue Nun and Black Tower.

These had little connection to good, moderately sweet German kabinetts and spätleses, or the much sweeter, contemplative wines like beerenauslese and eiswein. Nor did they have much to do with great dry rieslings from Alsace or Austria.

Even today, sweet German rieslings can be polarizing. I think they are gorgeous: wonderful with food, and both refreshing and transporting. Still, when I wrote a 2017 Wine School column about German spätlese rieslings, readers’ resistance to these wines was strong.

People seem more accepting of dry riesling, which is the predominant style around the world, even in Germany.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to discern which rieslings are dry and which have some degree of sweetness. German rieslings marked “trocken” are always dry, but not all dry German rieslings carry the designation. Some might be marked “grosses gewächs,” indicating a dry wine from a top site, unless it comes from the Rheingau region, where such a wine might be marked “erstes gewächs.” If in doubt, don’t hesitate to ask.

Austrian rieslings are almost always dry. Alsatian rieslings, unless they are late-harvest bottlings, ought to be dry. For a time around the beginning of the century, some were bottled with residual sugar and without designation, which could be a rude surprise. But this issue has largely been rectified in the last few years.

Australian rieslings tend to be dry unless marked otherwise. This is also true of American rieslings, most of the time. But occasionally I am surprised. If you’re in doubt, it’s worth double-checking with a retailer or sommelier.

Dry or sweet, riesling is among the most transparent of grapes, one that can be grown and produced around the world with distinctive results, assuming it has been planted in the right sort of place, ideally with a cool climate in rocky soils on a slope, the steeper the better.

I love rieslings year-round, but am particularly drawn to them in the spring and early summer, maybe because they are so good with seasonal dishes like asparagus, soft-shell crabs and wild salmon. Rieslings are light and refreshing, and German ones in particular, dry or sweet, are often delicate and low in alcohol, though I have come upon a few surprising bruisers.

In the interest of championing the beauty of riesling, here are 10 moderately priced bottles of dry riesling, roughly $20 to $45, from around the world.

With so many great dry rieslings, why these? In the pandemic mode of shopping online, these are the ones I could find, which is not to demean them. They are wonderful. So are many others. This is not a Top 10 list by any means.

Why these prices? I have written about less expensive rieslings before. The Finger Lakes is a great source, from producers like Ravines, Forge Cellars, Bloomer Creek, Nathan Kendall, Dr. Konstantin Frank and Red Tail Ridge.

For a little more money, the West Coast offers some excellent rieslings, but producers like Smith-Madrone, Stony Hill and Tatomer in California and Brooks, Trisaetum and Teutonic in Oregon are not always so easy to find.

Alsace makes terrific rieslings, but they tend to be more expensive. Terrific rieslings are coming from Australia, like Frankland Estate, Grosset and Mac Forbes, though, sadly, some of the best bottles, from producers like La Violetta, don’t even come to the United States.

In general, cheaper riesling is simpler riesling. While there’s always a time and place for these wines, it’s sometimes necessary to pay a little more to experience riesling’s ability to convey the nuanced characteristics of a place.

Wine from great vineyards is labor-intensive, especially from wineries with wildly steep hillsides like the Mosel Valley of Germany. Those rieslings are farmed by hand and made by hand. They may cost more, but they are great values.

Here are the 10 bottles in order of price, from low to high.

Hermann J. Wiemer Seneca Lake Riesling Dry 2018 $19.99

Hermann J. Wiemer, an immigrant from the Mosel Valley, was one of the pioneering modern winemakers in the Finger Lakes and an early proponent of riesling there. Mr. Wiemer sold the estate in 2007 to Oskar Bynke and Fred Merwarth, who manages the vineyards and makes the wine. The Wiemer rieslings have always been more floral than mineral. Breathing in this wine is like inhaling a meadow full of flowers. It’s floral on the palate, too, with a touch of fruit and wet stones.