Riesling Spatlese
We're moving up the classification ranks of German Riesling and today, we arrive at Spatlese, literally meaning late harvest. The grapes for a Riesling Spatlese are typically picked about one full week after the traditional harvest. Understand, however, that in an American context, when a wine is designated late harvest, it implies sweet. In the case of Riesling Spatlese, while the wines are almost always sweeter and fruitier than Riesling Kabinett, there is no requirement.
What is required is that the must have a specific mass (varying by growing region) of at least 85 Oeschel in the Rheingau, for example. That's a pretty dense juice that has the ability to be made quite sweet. Of course, full fermentation can produce a trocken style Riesling Spatlese, but this is generally considered to be counterproductive.
Since it's a "higher-quality" wine that will fetch a higher price on the market, why would winemakers not produce all their Riesling to be at least in the Spatlese classification? Grape growing (for wine) is a science, yet an imprecise science. Many vineyard masters, known as vignerons, pick their grapes by taste, others by brix (the percenatage of fermentable solids, mostly sugars), and some by a combination of the two. In traditional harvest (not late) wines, many vignerons will wait until as late as possible a date before harvest. It produces grapes that tend to give us richer, fuller-bodied wines. The risk that they run, however, is that weather conditions, particularly rain, will ruin the vintage. The idiosyncracies of many wine-growing regions often produce rains very shortly after the normal harvest dates, so producing Spatlese is not a guarantee of a wine deserving of that label from a quality standpoint.
As we move to the higher quality of the pradikat, the wines do get fruitier and more ageworthy. Our Riesling Spatlese that we drink today has all the notes of our Riesling Kabinett, but also significanly more stone fruit, particularly white peach. Among the more aged wines we are tasting, we also get a lot of honeycomb, ginger, citrus blossoms, diesel, gasoline, and lanolin (I swear that neither the diesel nor gasoline are bad things, but those are the descriptors used by tasters far more knowledge than me).
Serve your Riesling Spatlese "refrigerator cold) at about 5-6C/41-43F. Drink it after dinner as a means of making you relax after a long hard day or pair with Asian cuisine at dinner or a dessert of peach melba or lemon panna cotta. Or, better yet, pair your German wine with a German dessert and drink your Riesling Spatlese with streusel or franzbrotchen.
What is required is that the must have a specific mass (varying by growing region) of at least 85 Oeschel in the Rheingau, for example. That's a pretty dense juice that has the ability to be made quite sweet. Of course, full fermentation can produce a trocken style Riesling Spatlese, but this is generally considered to be counterproductive.
Since it's a "higher-quality" wine that will fetch a higher price on the market, why would winemakers not produce all their Riesling to be at least in the Spatlese classification? Grape growing (for wine) is a science, yet an imprecise science. Many vineyard masters, known as vignerons, pick their grapes by taste, others by brix (the percenatage of fermentable solids, mostly sugars), and some by a combination of the two. In traditional harvest (not late) wines, many vignerons will wait until as late as possible a date before harvest. It produces grapes that tend to give us richer, fuller-bodied wines. The risk that they run, however, is that weather conditions, particularly rain, will ruin the vintage. The idiosyncracies of many wine-growing regions often produce rains very shortly after the normal harvest dates, so producing Spatlese is not a guarantee of a wine deserving of that label from a quality standpoint.
As we move to the higher quality of the pradikat, the wines do get fruitier and more ageworthy. Our Riesling Spatlese that we drink today has all the notes of our Riesling Kabinett, but also significanly more stone fruit, particularly white peach. Among the more aged wines we are tasting, we also get a lot of honeycomb, ginger, citrus blossoms, diesel, gasoline, and lanolin (I swear that neither the diesel nor gasoline are bad things, but those are the descriptors used by tasters far more knowledge than me).
Serve your Riesling Spatlese "refrigerator cold) at about 5-6C/41-43F. Drink it after dinner as a means of making you relax after a long hard day or pair with Asian cuisine at dinner or a dessert of peach melba or lemon panna cotta. Or, better yet, pair your German wine with a German dessert and drink your Riesling Spatlese with streusel or franzbrotchen.
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