Riesling Revival

The Stevie Wonder of grapes trades syrupy for sophisticated.

By Jim Sutherland

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Of all the grape nuts, doubtless there’s one who’s the nuttiest of all, a sniffer of ritualistically pulled corks and swirler of meticulously chosen stemware who plans all his European vacations around the varietal of the moment. Back in the 1980s it was Bordeaux and Burgundy for cabernet and chardonnay, and a little later the charming hillside town of Saint-Émilion for merlot. The rise of shiraz had him off to the Rhone for syrah, then it was back to Burgundy when Sideways had everyone talking pinot noir. The genetic link to California zinfandel finally got him to Italy for primitivo, but can anyone believe he’s now headed to Germany?

As grape nuts go, I’m purely minor league, but this time round I’m one step ahead, accompanied by an assortment of wine buyers, writers and educators that the locals have taken to calling “Team Canada.” Drawing us to a long table in a modest winery-cum-family home a few kilometres from the French border in the little town of Saarburg is riesling, a grape that casts a powerful spell.

Tonight the first wine to be poured by host Hanno Zilliken is his entry-level Butterfly. Almost dry, it bursts with tropical fruit underlain with crisp minerality and a faint hint of petrol, a riesling signature. This style of wine matches perfectly with the fresher, lighter food that people are eating nowadays. And with alcohol levels that rarely exceed 12 percent, and are often in the single digits, riesling is perfect for those who like a couple of glasses at dinner but prefer to wake up in their own bed.

It’s no wonder that a Wine Spectator cover story recently hailed its resurgence; Robert Parker has just hired a new taster to cover its German homeland for The Wine Advocate and sales in North America are rising by around 10 percent a year. Riesling is nothing less than the 21st-century’s first big wine story. Yet for many wine drinkers it remains the Stevie Wonder of grapes: packed with pedigree and potential, but remembered for such syrupy renditions that they’ve largely written it off.

Admiring Zilliken’s packaging (somewhat of an oddity for a small German producer in that the label is graphically interesting and largely free of confusing nomenclature), I recall that many of riesling’s current challenges stem from the 1970s when German liebfraumilch and the like cavorting on labels briefly captivated young Baby Boomers discovering wine for the first time. Though most contained little or no riesling, their German origin and typical sweetness created confusion in consumers’ minds – not a good thing after they came to their senses and recognized that many of the wines were shudderingly bad.

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