Shhh! Don’t Spread the Word on Riesling

For Americans in love with Chardonnay, German Riesling seems light years away.

The traditional American thinking about Riesling is that it is sweet and thus doesn’t go with food. And since most Americans say they drink dry wine, Riesling is the Wrong Thing, a faux pas at the dinner table.

A small coterie of consumers is perfectly willing to allow the rest of us continue to believe this drivel because (a) they revere German Riesling, (b) they know how charming and perfectly agreeable it is with food and (c) they know that if they encourage a lot more people to get excited about this, it would merely drive the price way up.

Americans are not likely to discover the delights of Riesling on their own, because there are so few wine shops or restaurants that specialize in it. And if they do come across top-drawer German wines, they may but put off by labels with yard-long Teutonic names and an unfamiliar system of designations.

So esoteric is German Riesling here that two importers, Rudy Wiest of Carlsbad, Calif., and Terry Thiese of Washington, D.C., dominate U.S. imports. Between them they provide about 85% of the quality German wine we see.

I was reminded of the greatness of Riesling one searingly hot day in Los Angeles last week. I pulled the cork on a bottle of 1994 Maximin Grunhauser Herrenberg from Dr. Schubert ($16), and I discovered inside an astoundingly fresh, flowery Riesling that was noticeably sweet, a grand accompaniment to a shade tree and bit of hard cheese.

An hour later, though, I found out that the wine was also fine with grilled turkey burgers. The wine’s perfect balance of acidity and sweetness was at work here. And that reminded me (not that I needed reminding) that the dry styles of German Riesling are usually a stunning alternative to excessively priced, over-oaked, high-alcohol Chardonnays.

Coincidentally, I ran into Wiest the next day and told him of my fortune with the Grunhauser; he wasn’t surprised that the aperitif wine also was fine with food.

“It was a Maximin Grunhauser, a great vineyard, and it was a ‘94,” he said, “and ‘94s had the highest acid levels in Germany since I’ve been doing this,” which is about 20 years.

This level of acidity isn’t so high the wines are sour. The Germans have a word for this: filigran (“filigree”), a kind of pinpoint acidity that allows a wine like this to retain a fair amount of residual sugar, perhaps 2%, which in another wine would taste pretty sweet. Here, you get the feeling that the wine is just about dry.

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That’s the impression I got out of 1994 Schloss Lieser Estate Riesling ($9.50), a flowery wine with a honeysuckle and citrus blossom aroma: a first taste of sweetness (from 1.7% residual sugar), but a very complete finish, basically a dry wine. This wine is made by Thomas Haag, son of the famed Mosel producer Fritz Haag.

How can a wine be both sweet and dry at the same time? Search me. However, few wines of the world solve this conundrum with more consistency than do German Rieslings, and in such wines the alcohol level is generally under 10%, meaning not only fewer calories but also a lighter, more genteel taste that works particularly well with today’s lighter foods. A lot better than most Chardonnays.

Another fact that German lovers among us don’t want widely revealed is that the 1994 vintage is the seventh very good vintage in a row. Steve Pitcher characterizes the 1994s as having the richness of 1989s and the depth of the 1990s.

Pitcher, an attorney, is president of the German Wine Society of San Francisco as well as a wine columnist for Wine News magazine, and his assessment of the 1994s is simple: “I think it’s the best vintage in the last three, especially in the kinds of things you really want in the trockens. “

Trocken is the German word used for a dry wine, and tasting through a number of these wines, I realized what an amazing grape the Riesling is. Not only are the wines gorgeous now, they will be much better in years to come.

Says Pitcher, “The importers find it frustrating to show these wines today, especially to people who don’t have a great deal of experience with them, because they are not as complex as they will be in a year or two.”

Wiest concurs: “You need to hold these wines for five to seven years for them to reach their best.”

Age Riesling, you say? Many of us who have laid down Chardonnays only to find them dead in four years would shudder at cellaring Rieslings away for the better part of a decade. But as Wiest points out, 100 years ago the highest-priced wines at the London wine auctions were older vintages of “hock,” as Rieslings from the Rhineland were called.

“They were prized because they aged so well,” Wiest says. “For some reason, we have forgotten this.”

Wiest’s summary of the quality of the 1994s is succinct: “The quality of ’94 is fantastic, and the vintage is at its best in the Middle Mosel region. Ninety-four has provided us with some of the finest dessert wines in memory. It is a vintage that people will be talking about for a long time to come.”

Added Pitcher, “It was a difficult year, but it made great wines. I’m buying plenty, and I won’t open many of them for six to eight years.”

Terry Thiese, who works for Milton Kronheim and Co. Inc., has often done dinners in which a Riesling and a Chardonnay are tasted on the same table with food. These so-called taste-offs often prove enlightening for those who rarely taste Riesling with food.

If ever there was a vintage that asked for this treatment, 1994 is it.

I tasted a few of Wiest’s drier 1994 wines the other day and liked the following:

* Dr. Loosen Estate Riesling ($9.50): Flowery, quite dry and crisp with a perfect balance of sweetness and acidity so the wine isn’t too sour.

* Gunderloch Estate Riesling ($13.25): A bit more substantial than the previous wine, with a Rheingau earthy aroma. Very dry and crisp.

* Pfeffingen Riesling Spatlese “Ungsteiner Herrenberg” ($17.50): A true substitute for Chardonnay. The alcohol here (13%) comes from all the sugar being fermented out, so the wine is totally dry. This trocken wine is one of those rare instances where the term spatlese , which means “late-picked,” does not denote a sweet wine.

* Schlossgut Diehl Estate Riesling ($11): Flinty, mineral qualities with a trace of earth, but fresh and complex. A delicate spice and crisp finish.

* Karl Gunderloch “Jean Baptiste” Kabinett, Nackheimer Rothenberg ($13.50): Spicy with a clove/cardamom note, flowery and rich in taste. A sugar level above 2% is balanced by the high acid level, making it perfect for trying with rich and spicy foods. Superb Rheinhessen wine.

This last bottle is a kind of throwback to the days of wordy German wine labels, which were daunting to look at and nearly impossible to pronounce.

Wiest has been one of the leaders in getting German winemakers to use a more user-friendly label. As this label shows, not all of them have gotten with the program, and even with the modification in language on German wine labels over the last decade, the spell-check program on my computer still gets a serious workout.

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Wine of the Week

1994 Monchhhof Riesling Kabinett “Urziger Wurzgarten” ($13) --One of the Mosel’s great vineyard sites, and one of my favorites, is the Wurzgarten outside the town of Urzig. It is at the western edge of the Middle Mosel, north of the twisting Mosel River. The flowery and (especially) spicy aroma in this wine is typical of the vineyard ( wurzgarten means spice garden). The taste is typically soft and lush; sugar is noticeable in the entry, but then the wine finishes crisply, so the wine is another sweet-tart sensation. Try it with broiled fish. Chardonnay lovers will be aghast.