Just over thirty years ago, it was my sweet tooth that really got me hooked on wine. This I blame on my maternal grandparents. Even though I had spent much of my childhood on the opposite side of the world from them, they owned and operated what was once of the very finest and best-equipped chocolate and confectionary shops in England. Relief parcels crammed with chocolates and lollies of all colour and description were regularly despatched to their impatient and addicted grandchildren in Ballarat. ‘Candies’ is still there in Hertford to this day, but it’s not a patch on when I first stayed there back in 1970. With no storage space built into its five hundred year-old design, the hundreds of opened boxes of outrageously smooth and creamy Swiss chocolates needed to be stored on the steps of the several steep, narrow staircases that ultimately led up to the attic. Which is where my room was!So it was perfectly natural for me to find myself quite at home with the hundreds of perfumed, luscious and honeyed rieslings entering Australia from Germany and Austria just a few years later. As a student I was enticed and entranced by their unusual sweetness and concentration, but also with the ability of the finest and sweetest of them to finish with freshness and brightness. I was occasionally late with my college fees because I spent far more on these wines than I could really afford. Nevertheless, my palate eventually evolved from its exclusive and somewhat primeval focus on sweet German white and jammy Australian red. In doing so, it eventually came to appreciate that riesling expresses its mysteries and pleasures across a spectrum from the driest and nerviest to the most impossibly sweet and concentrated. Riesling is consistently and convincingly responsible for the widest range of wine styles of all the noble grape varieties. All of which helps to explain why hardly anybody here drinks it anymore.As part of my regular hosting of events, at which I meet people with all levels of wine knowledge and enthusiasm from the committed teetotaller to the avid cork dork, I can say for certain that less than five percent of wine drinkers will buy a bottle of riesling. Why? Because, according to those who do not, especially the younger set, you virtually need a degree in wine drinking to know what you are buying. Will it be bone-dry, slightly sweet, very sweet or ridiculously sweet? Besides, they say, their parents used to drink riesling! As an aside, one wonders how challenging it might be for New Zealanders to offload their wines to the offspring of the current sauvignon blanc generation.So riesling has not only a communication problem but an image problem as well. From an Australian perspective, this is bad timing indeed for today this country is making the best riesling in its winemaking history. It’s also dipping its toe into what for most Australian winemakers has been the grape’s dark side Ð the slightly sweet or ‘off dry’ (as the Kiwis call it) expression of the grape. Several makers, like Leasingham, Lethbridge, Bloodwood, Kanta, Frankland Estate and Pewsey Vale are making a very good fist of these wines, despite the fact that most established Australian riesling drinkers turn their noses up at any example of this grape with so much as a poopteenth of residual sweetness.To get to the point, most Australian riesling drinkers have been living in a vacuum. Older drinkers believe that riesling begins in the Eden Valley and ends in Clare, or vice-versa. They haven’t been and they won’t be bothered with classics from the Mosel like those from Max Richter and Ernie Loosen, or those from Alsace from people like Rene Muree and Albert Mann, or the modern Austrians from makers like Pichler and Nigl. So they don’t understand that sugar need not necessarily mean a cordial-like sweetness, or that sweet wines Ð improbably as it might sound Ð can also be genuinely refreshing. They’re stuck in a rut.Strangely or typically, depending on your point of view, the New Zealanders are well ahead of us on this score. For decades they have refined slightly or very sweet rieslings of great beauty and balance, exemplified by the wines of Pegasus Bay, Craggy Range, Framingham, Gibbston Valley, Ngatarawa and Millton.So, what can be done to improve the way riesling is sold and understood in Australia, where it is pigeonholed as being either dry as a crack or utterly bewildering, depending on how old you are? I have a proposal, which if implemented, would double sales of Australian riesling in an instant. Dry rieslings, those of 4 grams per litre of sugar or less, should all be bottled in green bottles. Off-dry or slightly sweet rieslings (of say up to 25 g/l) should be in blue bottles, the colour historically used in the Mosel to indicate such things. Sweeter rieslings, with sugar levels of 30 g/l and above, can be bottled in brown bottles. If they’re ultra-sweet, words like ‘late harvest’, ‘noble rot’ or ‘cordon cut’ will usually give sufficient notice to the buyer.All of a sudden, the thousands of people who have hitherto avoided riesling for all the shame and embarrassment it would doubtless cause Ð especially in a restaurant when a dessert wine is accidentally ordered for a main course Ð will be given the key information on whether to risk it or not, at a glance. And, if like me they want to start at the sweet end and work backwards, they’ll get it right, every time.
