Riz is the biz
Aaron Brasher in Top Value Wines Become a member to view this article
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If you polled the Australian wine community, riesling would be one of their favourite white varieties. Flickr
Top Value Wines Feature Week
Riesling, aka ‘riz’, has always offered up great value for money. If you have AUD $25 in your hand and walk into your local bottle shop, you can pretty well be guaranteed that a quality riesling will present itself.
If you polled the Australian wine community, riesling would be one of their favourite white varieties and rightfully so. It delivers value, quality and a true sense of place. Riesling is a variety that generally doesn’t have maturation in oak or have other artifact embedded. It’s a grape variety that gets picked then goes through a long, cool-ish fermentation process, usually in a stainless-steel tank, and once finished fermentation, it is settled, cleaned up and put into the bottle. This relatively straightforward process is why we see rieslings released mid-year, in the year of their vintage.
In our recent Top Value tastings, I tasted a number of rieslings that delivered real typicity, sense of place and value.I love young, racy riesling with all its citrusy tang and rapier-like acidity, these are wines to get the mouth watering and are great on their own or partner beautifully with freshly shucked oysters or sashimi. I also find that young riesling is really versatile and works wonderfully well over a yum cha luncheon of dumplings, duck and roast pork, with that aforementioned acidity cutting through any oiliness and fattiness of the food wonderfully well.
In our recent Top Value tastings, I tasted a number of rieslings that delivered real typicity, sense of place and value. The regions were well represented by the old stalwarts—Eden Valley and Clare Valley—as well as the cheeky new(ish) kid on the block, Great Southern in the remote southern edge of Western Australia.
A couple of other regions that also delivered the goods were Tasmania and the Adelaide Hills. A common trait of these regions is that they either have altitude or latitude delivering some viticultural coolness. Riesling is a variety that performs best in a moderate to cooler climate and enjoys a greater diurnal temperature range, i.e. warm days and cold nights.
Kaesler is a Barossa based winery, but it has a 60-year-old riesling vineyard in Clare from which to source fruit. The Kaesler Stonehorse Riesling 2023 delivers all that is fabulous about Clare Valley riesling. The product of a later than average vintage, it’s pithy, pure and has line and length that brings to mind a Glenn McGrath delivery.
Millon Wines is a relatively newcomer but its Millon The Impressionist Riesling 2023 is all old school Eden Valley. Youthful and vibrant in the glass, with lashings of just-ripe white stone fruit and fleshy citrus goodness.
Great Southern is Australia’s largest wine region, comprising an area 200km from east to west and over 100km from north to south. The region excels in a number of varieties and riesling is right at the top of the tree. The Robert Oatley Signature Series Riesling 2023, sourced from the Frankland River subregion, has lovely fragrance and purity and the length is mightily impressive. Year in, year out this wine delivers quality and real value.
My own passion and admiration for riesling has only been reinforced by the recent tastings of the variety and firms up my belief that riz is indeed the biz.The Wicks family have been growing and making wine in the Adelaide Hills for a couple of decades now and their Wicks Estate Riesling 2024 is right in the zone. Only recently bottled, it’s tooth crackingly fresh and crunchy. There’s a reminder of Bickford’s Lime Juice Cordial and the acidity has real ping.
Tasmania also delivers in the riesling stakes, and the Ninth Island Riesling 2023 brings plenty of complexity and exotica to the table. Fresh and crunchy, with grapefruit, guava and a lick of nutty nougat, this is a very more-ish wine.
The final riesling that really took my fancy was Rieslingfreak No 34 Tale of Two Valleys Riesling 2024, a blend of Eden and Clare Valley fruit. This brings together the great attributes of both regions and results in a riesling that is delicate, floral and full of citrus and bath salts and with fine, piercing acidity. This is a wine that will definitely benefit from 7-10 years tucked away.
My own passion and admiration for riesling has only been reinforced by the recent tastings of the variety and firms up my belief that riz is indeed the biz.