It hurts to say this, but riesling is proof positive that nobody pays any attention to wine writers. Australian wine writers, trade and winemakers have been talking up the virtues of riesling for decades now, but Australian sales of riesling are pretty static. That’s despite the fact that the current crop of Australian rieslings are as good as they have been. Ever.
Perhaps more than any other white grape, riesling has an inherent ability to reflect its site and climate. It’s so unbelievably honest that no amount of winemaking trickery will hide the fact that a season might be too wet or too hot, or that a vineyard site might simply not be up to it. It holds everyone completely accountable.
But that’s where modern Australian riesling has such an advantage. From Clare we find wines of concentration, length and structure. The Clare Valley’s wines are ripe, juicy and punchy, delivering floral aromatics and intense lemon/lime flavours around a steely acid frame. The best can be exceptionally aromatic in their youth and can then develop slowly for many years. Tighter and finer in their youth, more mineral and powdery, Eden Valley riesling can reveals a heady, bathpowder-like perfume with a purity of fruit and a classical drying, chalky texture. It’s also capable of exceptional longevity.
From Tasmania we experience more of a European – Alsace especially – spectrum of pear, peach and apple, while from the Great Southern in Western Australia we’re enticed by spice, a deep floral perfume, with a spectrum more suggestive of stonefruit, guava and tropical notes. While there’s considerable variation within this large and diverse region, there’s a pleasing muskiness and spice about the perfume of the finest of them, which retain their racy freshness and zest well into their second decade. From Henty, in western Victoria, come rieslings of purity, intensity, shape and texture. So, the Australian wine landscape is dotted with a range of regions capable of making riesling to the highest standard.
It’s been a journey for antipodean riesling. Back in the mid-1970s, it was our hip wine grape. Riding the crest of the move from drinking whites to reds, riesling represented the height of sophisticated drinking for countless Australians. Less sophisticated drinkers amused themselves and their partners with the raft of sweet Liebfraumilch and ‘moselle’ styled whites whose only real rival in the quantity department was Mateus Rosé. My, how we have grown!
Modelled on the classic wines of John Vickery, the legendary Leo Buring winemaker, Australian riesling was as dry as a crack. It was relatively low in alcohol (rarely over 12%; often significantly less) and cellared beautifully given its restrained expression of flavour and balance of acidity. Vickery himself left a legacy of long living, bone-dry, tightly protected and spotlessly clean riesling capable of maturing for decades.
Then Brian Croser began to make even more popular rieslings with a modest residual cube of sugar – wines like the Hardy’s Siegersdorf 1975 vintage which changed the trend. Wolf Blass then capitalised on this, making and marketing huge volumes of Yellow Label Riesling that people drank because they thought it was fruity and dry. But it was sweet, and Wolfie made a killing, well before other makers broke out of their pure, dry approach and started to emulate.
Croser was next to influence the wine when in the early 1980s he began to craft his so-called ‘dry spatlese’ style of Petaluma Rieslings, a term for wines made from fully ripened grapes that are fermented to complete dryness. Most contemporary Australian riesling has since been influenced by this approach, which although partially sacrificing some of the exceptional longevity of the Vickery style, does engender mouthfilling flavour, plus surprising richness and mouthfeel. This is the model for most modern Australian riesling, which has since been tuned even further by the modern masters, led by Jeff Grosset.
Throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s we saw a sound, consistent but oft-repeated model of Australian riesling. We were taught as winemakers to leave it alone, and given a small amount of fine-tuning with issues like fining, acid addition and management of sulphur dioxide, there wasn’t much impact or innovation concerning the way it was treated in the cellar.
That’s where things have changed, and for the better. Australian riesling makers have since tuned into the very different techniques and philosophies deployed on the other side of the world, especially in Austria, whose rieslings have recently captured the imagination of the entire wine world.
In the vineyard, our better growers are looking closely at fruit exposure, yields and harvest dates. They’re more selective within their vineyards, treating special batches of fruit separately from the rest. In the ‘mesh’ joint venture between Grosset and Yalumba’s Robert Hill Smith, the vineyards are picked several times, row by row, to ensure and optimal and more even ripeness. As a consequence, we’re now seeing more complexity in our youthful wines, more interesting, slatey and mineral textures, more tightly sculpted palate structures and a significantly wider spectrum of fruit-derived characters.
In the cellar, our best makers are experimenting with techniques such as oxidative handling with low sulphur levels, often followed by a decent shot of sulphur dioxide at bottling. Others are deploying ‘wild’ or ‘indigenous’ yeasts. Some makers are using a pre-fermentation cold soak, encouraging the development of rounder textures and secondary flavours. Others are playing with extended lees contact after fermentation, sometimes in the process developing profoundly wild and woolly flavours that do perhaps mask some site-derived character in favour of winemaking expressiveness. Some, such as Frankland Estate, led the move into the fermentation and then maturation of riesling inside very large and relatively neutral oak casks, often in the large oval ‘foudre’ shape..
Australia’s riesling specialists such as Leo Buring, Seppelt (for its Drumborg Riesling), Frankland Estate, Grosset, Mount Horrocks, Pikes, Orlando (especially with the ‘Jacobs Creek Steingarten Riesling’), Castle Rock Estate, Pewsey Vale, Larry Cherubino, KT and the Falcon and Tim Adams are steadily developing more interesting and complex results.
It’s hard to overstate the credit due to Frankland Estate’s Judy Cullam and Barrie Smith. For several years their small, remote vineyard in Western Australia single-handedly staged several biennial International Riesling Tastings in Sydney and Melbourne that brought together the cream of the world’s riesling makers to mix ideas and philosophies with the home-grown variant.
It’s no coincidence that since that time Australian riesling has become more complete, focused, tightly sculpted and complex in its youth. As it ages, it now presents more of a floral perfume with a broader spectrum of fruit than the typical lime juice/lemon pith and occasional keroseney notes traditionally associated with it. There’s more musk and funkiness, more stonefruit, blossom and minerality, while the finest often reveal a genuinely briny finish.
All of which makes modern Australian riesling better to drink on its own, and significantly better with food. Indeed, few wines perform better in an all-round capacity across a spectrum of different Asian cuisines. The tightness, freshness and dryness of Australian riesling fits it naturally with sushi and sashimi. Its spice, perfume and inherent fruit sweetness help it work across spicier dishes from Thailand to Singapore hawker style and Sichuan. Its purity, delicacy and freshness enable it to marry neatly across a number of Cantonese dishes, especially around a Yum Cha menu. It’s also a natural fit with the purity, freshness and lightness of so many Vietnamese dishes.
We’re delighted to offer an exceptional collection of riesling in our shop, ranging from recently released classics from makers like Pikes, Tim Adams, Castle Rock Estate, Pipers Brook, Swinney and Ros Ritchie, plus two fine examples from the Mosel in Germany from Dr Loosen. Click here to see the full range. Like every other wine chosen in the Shop, they’re all amongst the best of their kind at their price-point.
Now the season is steadily warming and summer is imminent, I strongly suggest it’s time to either maintain your enthusiasm for, rekindle your old affection for or, if you’ve managed to miss out on this exceptional grape until now, commence your new lifelong relationship with riesling. Click here to see our collection of videos that will introduce and further explain the variety for you.
On that note, it’s time to stick a Tim Adams Skilly Ridge Riesling from the wonderful 2021 season into the fridge…
