Perhaps the days of 'Blue Nun' and other similar sweet and nasty imports that 'cloyed' on the palate have left an indelible mark in the memories of those old enough to have been confronted by their lack of quality. Whatever the reason, riesling afficiandoes are a small, elite group that almost justify 'cult status,' because they 'get-it' and the rest don't - according to them. That's not say they are snobby about it but riesling polarises white wine drinkers into those with a jaundiced view who would never or rarely touch it and those who genuflect at the mere thought of it. I must admit that I empathise with the latter group and got quite excited about putting together this tasting that would bring Waipara and Marlborough face to face in a bid to establish regional superiority - but it just wasn't that simple and riesling threw up complications that didn't exist with pinot noir.
The objective of doing our riesling tasting
The idea was to do seven flights of two wines - one from each region. The wines of each flight would be matched together based on similar styles, prices and vintages. We would cover the gambit of styles from dry to off-dry to medium and building to spatlese or late harvest and possibly dessert (noble or botrytised). Finding matches in each of these departments using PH, T/A and RS levels proved difficult enough without then having to add in the same vintages and price points. Consequently, it was a nightmare that resulted in not being able to use lots of rieslings I had hoped to use because of the lack of an opponent from the other region to match it against; example being Pegasus Bay Riesling which is a style not duplicated in Marlborough (that I could find). Vintage was a problem too, as we know that rielsing develops more in the bottle than possibly any other varietal and the aromatics alter accordingly.
Pre-tasting I got stuck trying to match wines up and, in retrospect, it was a mistake to restrict this tasting to two regions as the results are somewhat inconclusive due to vintage, price-point and analylitical variation on some flights. Residual sugar levels are a problem with this type of tasting as 'sugar' is the great seducer and some tasters scores just rose as the sugar levels increased. The result is that the dryer styles that were the early flights suffered in the scoring. A good example being the Cloudy Bay Riesling 2005 which I personally scored 18/20. But it didn't go down that well with some of our tasters and averaged a score of just 15.75pts - one scorer marked it as low as 11 - that's the beauty of a blind tasting and having your own opinion however much we differ. The rules of our tasting was that prior to placing your score on the card there was no table-talk about the wine so that the score would truly be 'your own.'
One of our wines labelled 'Late Harvest' was in fact botrytised which caused a major mismatch to the late harvest wine to which it was paired. Nevertheless, the results below tell the story of the night and what our tasters preferred - all wines were blind to every taster including our Judge Terry Copeland who experienced more difficulty picking the regions than in the pinot noir where the wines are more peculier to the terroir of the region.
The result of the tasting was a clear win to Marlborough by 5 flights to 2 and on the judge's score card it was 4 to 1 with 2 equal. Due to reasons already mentioned it's a contentious result that could be argued and a future riesling tasting would be best achieved by disregarding the regions and looking at styles only. Now check out the results below:
