From the name alone you can probably tell this is a German wine ... thanks to two colliding incidents today I find myself drinking a bottle of von Kesselstatt Spatlese. One: today was the day of the German wine tasting in Toronto, over 100 wines of which 90% were Riesling - you would expect after leaving such a tasting that one would have no interest in tasting Riesling for quite some time, but that's where you are wrong, it only whet the appetite for something aged and interesting in the Riesling department. Two: on my way home from the tasting I tweeted from the train a choice of wines I was thinking of drinking, one was a local Gamay, the other a German Riesling (which I was pairing with fish) ... within seconds of posting my friend Alex Good from Calgary wrote back: "Riesling. Pick the Riesling." And so the table was set for the Reichsgraf. And how right he was. At 11-years-old this wine showed very little sign of its age, in fact the only thing my wife noted, when I poured her a glass, was the wine seemed dark in colour ... golden. From there it was all uphill ... the nose was apple and apricot with some lemon rind and minerality showing through. The palate just made you want to take sip after sip, and at only 8% alcohol it was so easy to do. A lovely sweetness filled the mouth mixing with it apricot, pear and some intense sweet lemon notes - my wife called it "apple juice" - but there was so much more here. The acidity helped to balance it out, but it did not get in the way of the gulpability of this wine ... I think my Riesling-loving friend, Alex, would have loved this one ... my wife will stick to her dry Rieslings ... but there's something to be said for a well-made, well-executed Spatlese that one just can't quite put into words except to say: "you've got to try this."
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