Riesling for the petrol averse

:wink: The German Riesling aging rec thread got me wondering about this issue. I started out my wine drinking with reds on a visit to France when I was 15 but found that I couldn’t find anything suitable (compared to what I remembered from my France visit) in my price range when I started drinking wine again in my early twenties. From there, I started drinking Riesling pretty extensively. As things moved along, I found a note of kerosine in some of them that I found offensive (no offense to the petrol lovers). I started moving away from Riesling for that reason. Soon after, I transitioned to reds and have only recently started exploring whites again.

Now that I’m starting to drink more whites again, I’d like to start drinking more Riesling since I used to really love its unique aromatics and flavors but anything more than an ephemeral soupçon of petrol/kerosine and I can’t handle it. (I am similarly intolerant to any kind of licorice or anise flavor and I wonder if there is any correlation since I think of both of them as having a sweet tar/petrochemical flavor to me).

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to avoid this petrol note. I think drinking Riesling very young is one fix but are there regions with high quality Riesling that are less likely to be affected.

I find that Leitz wines never really quite develop a strong petrol nose.

As you are in the Pacific NW like me, try some of the local Rieslings. I’ve yet to detect any petrol notes in the Rieslings from Paetra, Ovum or Love & Squalor.

I will definitely check them out. Thank you for the recommendations. I did have a WA Riesling last year that I found to have more petrol than I cared for. It was the Poet’s Leap IIRC. I’ve had a lot of Riesling from the Midwest and found most of it not to be terribly interesting but I’ll have to check out more local Riesling now that I live out west.

It´s RIESLING … Riesling … [cheers.gif]

(repeated several times, so no typo …)

Well that’s wierd.

Other than on rare occasions I have not run into much/any petrol from Donnhoff. I would agree with the comment above regarding Leitz as well.

That’s not a guarantee. There is no guarantee.

Just drink them youngish.

I have always felt that the petrol note is especially common on the wines of producers who go for high ripeness (and are often located in the warmer regions like Pfalz and Alsace). Therefore in your case I would go for cooler vintages/regions and perhaps also for trockens with ABV around only ~12 %.

I would love to hear what other people think, am I way off with my generalizations?

Thank you for pointing that out. I must have misspelled it some time ago and my auto fill suggestion on my iPhone keeps suggesting that spelling as I type and I never even thought about it.

  1. Drink them young.

  2. Avoid the warmer areas where it’s grown: Alsace, Washington State, Clare and Eden Valleys.

  3. Stick to the better producers.

Specific producers and wines to look for will help, but if you follow those 3 suggestions, you should have a very high success rate. Germany and Austria are very much your friends here.

Austria produces a lot of terrific dry rieslings at all price levels.

  1. Avoid the warmer areas where it’s grown: Alsace, Washington State, Clare and Eden Valleys.

Which Washington State Riesling is very petrol?

I have run into petrol in somewhat aged versions of the Eroica Riesling.

Well, in my humble experience petrol notes are found more often in off-dry Rieslings than in dry R. … and also in those produced with a certain % of Botrytis-grapes … (so a dry R. with high ripenes due to a % of botrytized grapes can very well develope a petrol note …)

I´d say that German R.s are more often affected than Austrians (except the very sweet BAs and TBAs …)

In Alsace I think it depends on the style …

All very general - and certainly no guarantee for anything …

TDN “petrol” is formed by warmth and direct sun exposure to growing grape clusters. These are the only significant factors that have been found, and they are extremely significant. I suppose botrytised grapes may have hung on the vines longer and thus been exposed to more sun. However, I know of no studies showing, and have not found in personal experience, any correlation between the presence or near absence of residual sugar and the amount of TDN present. There’s been a lot of work done to identify the causes of this aroma, and nothing I’ve seen has shown any link to winemaking. Very generally, Riesling grown in cool or cold areas tends to have far lower concentrations of TDN than Riesling grown in warm areas.

I don’t know which are “very” petrol, but I didn’t say that. When blind tasting Rieslings, I almost always find it more noticeable in examples from Washington than in Rieslings from cooler climates. Same with Alsace and Clare/Eden.

Give me the gas! Love it. In my experience, and I look for it, it’s found more in Alsatians than Germans.

So far I’ve heard:

  1. Avoid warmer regions that are more likely to develop more significant amounts the TDN compound.
  2. Specific regions may be better than others such as Austria, maybe Mosel or Rheingau, maybe Oregon.
  3. Specific recommendations for Paetra, Leitz, Donnhoff
  4. Drink them young
  5. Mixed reports of RS being a determining factor

This should provide a good place to start, thanks everyone.

Except that … (2) a lot of the wines we’ve talked about having sulfur or sulfur-like scents are from the Mosel and (4) it’s often quite apparent young.