Jancis R says riesling is better

[Adam_Frisch]

Well, I was trying to not throw Mel under the bus for being out of date…

Haha!

I would agree with Jancis that aromatically, Riesling is just in a class of its own.

[Marcu_Stanley]

The article in question is listed as free for all on the JR website.

What I saw in the 70s was that very quickly folks jumped from loving German wines to trying the new generation of Italian whites, and/or California Chardonnay. It happened in a two or three year period.
The tide went out for German wines and never came back in for a long time. So many theories:

Riesling was also huge in the 19th and early 20th century when it was expensive and considered one of the great wines along with Bordeaux and Burgundy.

Personally, I find Chardonnay and Riesling so different that I don’t understand comparing them to say one is “better” than the other. They can both be fantastic but in totally different ways. If I want white Burgundy Riseling won’t scratch the itch and vice versa.

[Mel_Knox]

David,

Thanks.
Usually I get hit by the bus.
Of course, comparing Riesling to Chardonnay is crazy, just like comparing Bordeaux to Burgundy is crazy.
But then, how would we insult each other?

In another article on Jancis’ site, Alder Yarrow talks about the guys who first planted grapes on Red Mountain in Eastern Washington.
They first planted riesling, perhaps a bit unusual for a Region V. But that’s what people drank back in the 70s. The first wines I drank from Washington and Oregon were both rieslings…unless you count the Nawico hybrid.

[eweininger]

Riesling used to be really big and people like Jancis keep trying to resurrect it.But to paraphrase Yogi, if people don’t want to drink it, you can’t stop them. In the 70s, when I worked for a wine store, we sold '71s like there was no tomorrow. California rieslings sold well. Then more and more people started to make chardonnay here in California. Italian white wine became something drinkable. People on low carb diets eschewed the residual sugar.

I feel like I’ve been hearing stories about the golden age of Riesling (in the US) forever, but always with different time period as the referent. I’m not trying to take a dig at Mel in any way, but is there good documentation of a golden age of some sort? And if so, what segment of white wine market are we referring to?

Or are we just talking about the19th century, when only a miniscule slice of population drank wine?

Anecdotally, when I worked in a wine store in the late 80s and early 90s I rang up many thousands bottles of wine, almost none of which were Riesling. The few we did sell were from the Pacific NW or maybe CA. But we sold far, far more “fume blanc” than Riesling. The Germans just collected dust. Austria (not to mention NY and Canada) was on exactly no one’s radar.

I know perceptions must have been extremely different in the days before California was seen as a legit source of fine wine. But did Riesling/German Riesling ever really occupy a significant part of the wine buying public’s attention? Is there really something to resurrect? Is Britain wildly different from the US in this regard?

[Mel_Knox]

I don’t know if we have access to data from back then as we do now. And we have to remember there are about a million wines available now that weren’t then and that wine is much bigger than it was then.

[Mel_Knox]

I have a 1978 catalog from the store where I worked. We listed 59 German whites and around 25 other rieslings, mostly from the West Coast. Somewhere I have some Drapier and Esquin catalogs from the same period and I will take a gander at them.