AT Nancy’s Wines for Food, a gemutlich little shotgun flat of a shop on Columbus Avenue, you have to walk past a wall of German Rieslings – about 100 of them – before you can get your hands on a Chardonnay or a Chenin Blanc.
This is a store in the grips of Riesling Madness.
“The quality you can get in German Riesling at about $15 is higher than in any other wine in the world,” says manager Evan Spingarn, a true believer.
“At $15, you can get really kick-ass German Riesling. For $20, you can get some of the best wines in Germany.”
The idea behind Nancy’s is to make it easy for people to find a good bottle of wine to drink with what’s for dinner (or lunch or breakfast).
Spingarn says they didn’t start out planning to flog German
Riesling, but they kept finding it worked better with all sorts of food than almost any other wine, including the overoaked, high-alcohol stuff that comes out of California and elsewhere.
This year, for the first time, Nancy’s is selling more Riesling than any other varietal – and they hope that’s a sign of a shift in the Zeitgeist, toward rescuing German wines from the closeout bin of history.
The trend seems to be catching on. Annual imports of all German wines have hovered at just over a million cases for years. Suddenly, in the first five months of this year, imports jumped 30 percent, according to the German Wine Information Bureau.
The first thing to know is that German wine isn’t just Blue Nun and Liebfraumilch – sweet, cheaply made wines imported by the tanker load in the ’60s and ’70s, which probably never saw a drop of Riesling.
Riesling is one of the world’s greatest white wine grapes and it reaches a peak of expression in Germany because of the cool climate, which boosts the acid in the fruit.
High acidity is the key to these wines. It’s refreshing, it makes your mouth water and it balances the sweetness or fruitiness of the wine – “exactly like lemonade,” as Spingarn puts it.
The German wines also tend to be low in alcohol, which makes them easy to drink and more compatible with food – including Asian cuisine and spicy dishes.
The first step with these wines is to decipher the label.
The way to break the code is to understand that the label can tell you two basic things about what’s inside – how dry or sweet the wine is and how ripe the grapes were when they were picked.
Excluding dessert wines, many of the best German wines are classified as either:
* Kabinett – meaning the grapes meet a specific standard of ripeness, or
* Spatlese – “late-picked,” meaning the grapes were left to ripen longer on the vine.
Riper grapes give more intense flavors. The wines made from them are often more expensive, more full-bodied and sweeter – unless they are vinified to a drier style.
If the label says “trocken,” which means “dry,” the wine is bone dry. “Halbtrocken” – “half-dry” – means it can contain about as much sugar as a Brut Champagne, which isn’t much.
The trick is to decide what style you want – maybe a dry but intensely flavored wine (such as a trocken Spatlese) or a wine that’s fruity but high in acid (such as a straight Kabinett or Spatlese).
There’s a raft of other terms you could memorize, but these seem to be a good place to start. As far as vintages go, 11 out of the last 12 have been super (’99 was the clinker).
Here are the wines I tried at Nancy’s. When you’re shopping, don’t look for the exact wines so much as the style – a good $10 trocken, say, or a zesty Spatlese.
Balthasar Ress Riesling Trocken Rheingau 1998 ($10). Nothing fancy here, just a clean, dry Reisling that Spingarn says would go well with sushi.
Immich-Batterieberg Riesling Kabinett Mosel-Saar-Ruwer 1998 ($13). This has the wet slate smell typical of the Mosel region, classy with a taste of pears and an almost bitter nuttiness. Spingarn says, it’s “awesome with barbecued pork or chicken.”
Schafer-Frolich Bockenauer Felseneck Riesling Spatlese Trocken Nahe 1999 ($17). “It’s weird, high acid and electric, but with tons of flavor,” says Spingarn, who serves it with pork and rich sauces.
J.u.H.A. Strub Niersteiner Paterberg Riesling Spatlese Rheinhessen 1998 ($20). “A full-throttle Spatlese from a really ripe vintage and their best vineyards.” It’s got the peachy, fuller smell of a wine from the Rhine region, complex flavors and a long finish. A good choice for Thanksgiving turkey.