German Wines

[Innkeeper]

Hi Scotty, and welcome to the Wine Board. It seems that a certain virus of wine snobbery that started here in the States has reached your shores as well. It goes something like this: "Surely my dear, you're not drinking any wine that isn't bone dry are you?" This being uttered by a person sipping a California Chardonnay that is drenched in oak, surreptitiously contain 2-3% residual sugar, and actually tastes nothing like wine.

Most wine surely is best vinified dry, but the Germans have taught us how to appreciate sweet wine. Most of the best of them are made with the riesling grape; a most versitile grape that is far superior to chardonnay. It can and the Germans do make a dry wine (troken), a slighlty sweet one (kabinett), more sweet (spatlese), and quite sweet (auslese). Even sweeter dessert wines are also available.

Until very recent years, the Germans drank these wines with everything. Troken with weissfishe, and auslese with saurbraten. Internationization has now gotten them into red wine with beef and prior horrors like that. Fortunately there are still plenty of folks on both sides of the ocean that like German Riesling in all its guises.

[This message has been edited by Innkeeper (edited 04-15-2002).]