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NEWSLETTERS | Classic Clippings
Flowering 1998
Contents :
On a recent trip to Sydney, I ran riesling tutorials for the trade .
One topic that was covered was an attempt to explain the factors responsible for quality in rieslings sourced from Polish Hill River.
I used the concept of the basic elements of all matter, as defined by the ancient Greeks.
Fire: sunlight and warmth vary from one season to another within a region, and it is possible to identify regions sharing similar sunlight and warmth, yet with divergent wine styles. Therefore, fire, whilst a necessary ingredient for the grape, must be a minor determinant of quality.
Water: if the amount of water. and the concentration of solutes was critical to quality, then every vigneron with an abundant supply of good water, and the right bags of soluble fertiliser would be making gold-medal riesling.
Air: contains the basic building block of wine, carbon dioxide, yet its concentration is no different from Alice Springs to Geelong.
Earth: when we look at rieslings from Polish Hill River, and compare them to similar wines from Watervale and Mintaro, both less than l0km away, there are distinct differences, that can only be explained by the differences of soil and stone.
I recently conducted a tasting of our rieslings from the present vintage, back to 1986. If we exclude decrepitude, there are three stages in the life of a good riesling.
1. young and lively, with tropical fruit flavours.
2. honeyed and toasty at about 5 years of age.
3. The ten-plus year wines with the cedary aromas and oily aromatics.
Chemically, riesling contains terpenes (think turpentine) and hydroxycinnamates (think cinnamon bark). The oily and cedary characteristics represent a polymerisation of these compounds, that I describe as wood volatiles.