Vapid-personality Riesling

I’ll come clean, when I find that a Riesling has low alcohol and is bottled with a bit of residual sugar I am a real sucker for it. I buy a bottle enthusiastically and hope it’ll deliver even a small fraction of the thrilling, nervy tension of wines made in the home of this style, Germany, can deliver. I’m happy to admit I usually end up feeling as disappointed, wilted and dejected as a three month old banana.

This bottle is 9%. “Great!”, I hear you think (and I often do hear you think, this is the power of paranoid schizophrenia), “that’d lubricate my lunch just a treat!”. I agree. But it is 5.3 standard drinks and I am sure if the unspeakable swine Don Shenker from the utterly venom-worthy organisation Alcohol Concern or, perhaps, one of the more rabidly sanctimonious, self-opinionated and generally loathsome doctors from the British Meddling Association, heard that someone was having such a healthful and improving amount of drink with their luncheon they’d immediately get them locked up for being a ‘hazardous drinker’. What a bunch of detestable filth-peddlers.

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Riesling Moutere 2008, Neudorf

By freaking arse this has the most utterly repellent and loathsome nose I’ve ever encountered! I use the word ‘repellent’ advisedly as it positively reeks of purest flyspray. There is bugger all else there apart from insecticide – it is disgusting, seriously disgusting! I am going to leave my glass for a bit and go and rant to my guests about how people who abuse Riesling like this should have their toes cut off with rusty garden shears. OK, it is ten minutes later, I’ve calmed down somewhat, and I am amazed (and rather pleased) to report that the bug poison aspects have largely gone. I can just detect them under the surface desperate to leap out and massacre blowflies, but the main aroma is quite nice, although depressingly one-dimensional, lime fruit. Nicer, but dull as particularly prosaic dishwater. The palate is nice to drink. It has good enough acidity, reasonable sugar levels and some lime fruit. But it, too, is also definitely of the humdrum idiom. It is so simple you’ve almost got to wonder if the winemaker has added a bit of bleach to the fermentation tanks to strip out a bit of flavour – Riesling surely cannot be so banal? Indeed, if I owned a vineyard producing such utterly tedious Riesling I’d get an ampelographer to check I didn’t have some vastly inferior clone planted and a psychiatrist to check the winemaker didn’t have a pathological aversion to flavour. For sure, once the noisome fly spray aroma has gone you can drink this easily enough but you’ll be frighteningly bored and generally disenchanted by the end of your first glass. It is just so dreary. This definitely sub-interest, and I almost feel it would wear that epithet with pride.