Thursday, 10 September 2009
2009 Polish Hill Riesling
2009 Springvale Riesling
Here at the Little House of Concrete we tend to be a little light on for liquid refreshment to offer visitors.
Of course, if they’ll take a drink, there are plenty of options. When The Actor or The Scoffer lob on the doorstep we know they’ll accept a coffee and Madam has a couple of variations on the tea theme, but things pull up short if you’re looking for a non-alcoholic, non-tea or coffee option.
That fact was reinforced when we had a visit from The Celebrity Spotter from the Movie Volunteers. We offered a tea or coffee, could have tempted her with a wine but she was driving and ended up providing glasses of freshly-filtered water. As our guest was leaving, Madam was apologetic about the lack of something in the way of non-alcoholic liquid refreshment.
“It’s all right,” she replied. “I like water. It’s my favourite drink.”
The reference to favourite drink somehow propelled me towards the wine rack, and a subsequent question regarding my favourite had me waving a bottle of Grosset Polish Hill Riesling that had, coincidentally arrived that morning.
While, at that point in time, I hadn’t tried either of the Grossets I’ve got a long-standing belief if I was forced to limit myself to a single grape variety, that variety would be Riesling, and while I’m partial to what I’ve sampled from Tasmania and South Australia’s Eden Valley and keen to try the styles coming out of Western Australia’s Great Southern region, if you forced me to specify a single region as well as a single variety the region would be Clare.
I think much of the appeal of Riesling is the fact that what you get in the glass is the direct result of what comes out of the vineyard filtered through winemakers’ skill and experience and there’s not much the winemaker can do to conceal faults in the fruit. While you can use oak barrels to add extra flavour components to a number of red varieties and some of the whites, Riesling doesn’t allow makers that luxury.
Actually, if you’re going to start playing around with Riesling you’re heading towards the upper end of the price range rather than turning dodgy material into something saleable.
We found a couple of examples of that when we were in the Clare Valley in November 2008. In almost every case, the first wine on offer was a Riesling and every one was wonderful. In some cases there was more than one. At Kilikanoon, for example there was Mort’s Block Riesling and Mort’s Reserve. The difference (apart from the $9 difference in price)?
The Reserve was made entirely from free-run juice from fruit sourced from selected rows from the vineyard. Once the free-run juice was gone, the rest went through the presses to go in with the rest of the must from the rest of the vineyard.
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