The Times they are a-changin

A customer brings in the wine article from The New York Times about top quality German wines. She wants to know if I have any. Do I have any?

I sold her a bottle and I drank one tonight of the Schloss Schoenborn 2004 Erbacher Marcobrunn Erstes Gewachs. The Erstes Gewachs is a relatively new designation for German wine. It is the equivalent of a First Growth from France. A single top quality vineyard and made into a dry wine from Riesling yields the best of the best of Germany. Prior to WWI, most German wines were made into this dryer style, but when the Allies took back Germany, the cellars only held the sweet, rare dessert wines and after both WW's, people on this side of the pond assumed all German wines were sweet. Wrong.

Tonight I drank the wine with a variety of foods and it worked nicely with everyting but the soup and dessert courses. The aroma of the wine was classic German Riesling fuel-apple and it played a trick on your brain because the wine was crisp and dry. One meat I did not have it with tonight was chicken, and I think that will be the best match.

These wines are not cheap. But when you compare a French First Growth in the hundreds of dollars per bottle, a Riesling of similar breed and quality is a bargain at $39.99.