Thank You Mr Grosset
Anyone whose drinking habits resemble mine has reason to thank Jeffrey Grosset.
For a start there’s the small matter of what goes into a container labelled Riesling. Only a few years back tyou found bottles and casks in your bottle shop identified as Claret, Burgundy, Chablis or Moselle, all perfectly acceptable terms in Europe where you had an interrelation between the label descriptor, grape variety and geographic place of origin.
In Australia those terms became generic tags to apply to wine styles that, in most cases, bore next-to-no resemblance to their European counterparts.
Under pressure from the European Union such descriptors have gradually disappeared. We’re into the last round right now as Tokay becomes Topaque and Sherry becomes Apera. Along the way there was, apparently, a push to allow Riesling to be allowed as a generic descriptor rather than a varietal label. Not something that you’d be keen on if you were a producer of quality wine in the Clare Valley.
Jeffrey Grosset was one of the leaders in the (to quote Mr Halliday) long and ultimately successful battle to prevent the use of ‘riesling’ on flagons and bottles as a generic description.
Well done, sir.
That habit of using Riesling to describe a dry or semi-dry white wine that’s not as sweet as moselle is going to take a bit of killing off, though. A couple of years we hosted a little gathering to test-drive Hughesy’s Trivia Night questions for the year, and I offered a couple of the participants a glass of riesling for starters.
No thanks, came the reply. We don’t like Riesling.
Yes, Hughesy retorted. Maybe you don’t but try this one anyway.
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