The Wino Club Logo

The Wino Club Logo

Tuesday

Winning Riesling Wine




Our personal wine club tasted Riesling this month. Actually we tasted 16 Rieslings this month and I can't even tell you the sugar rush that that experience brought on. My little heart almost burst when the last wine of the evening was a Spatlese!

Needless to say, there can be only one winner at the end of all of that tasting and ours was 2006 Clos du Bois Riesling. So why do I have photos of two bottles? Keep reading and my thoughts will become clear.

2006 Clos du Bois Riesling can be referred to as a basic, not too sweet Riesling. On the nose we detected honey, ginger and tangerine. Upfront flavors of ripe fruit come rushing out at you although the citrus punch finish ends the flavors quickly leaving a high acidic ending, pithy almost. This is not a complicated wine. It is a mainstream wine hailing from the Santa Lucia Highlands in the Monterey Valley and at around $12 a bottle you can serve it to anyone on a hot day. Thanks to Lisa VanEssen-Vinton (owner http://www.services4success.com/) for bringing it!

Winner out of the way now I can add my two cents. Wine is a completely personal experience so I can honestly say that although our club voted fair and square, I preferred the second place wine and will buy it for the fridge, thus the second photo.

It was the 2005 Dr. Weins-Prum Riesling Kabinett hailing from Wehlener Sonnenuhr in the Mosel-Sarr-Ruyer region in Germany. That was a mouthful and so was the wine. I love Kabinett and Troken Rieslings hailing from Mosel-Sarr-Ruyer in the first place with their drier fruitiness than typically found in American Rieslings. This particular Riesling had a nice full nose of peaches and apricots, jasmine, green apples, minerals, and surprisingly cinnamon. This QmP rated wine did not let me down on the palette either. It had well rounded sugars, leaving the fruit to do the talking with an elegant almost pineapple finish. Unlike the Clos du Bois which hits you all at once, it had a nice full flavor that left me asking for one more sip to figure it out. And I took multiple 'one more sips' and revisited it at the end of the evening just to see if my palette had changed after the tasting as it sometimes does. But my first impression was consistent with my last. And for around $17 it's one wine I can definitely recommend checking out.

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