Wine Club November – Niagara Rieslings

This past Thursday’s Wine Club was a bit of treat for me as I wasn’t the one picking up the wines.  Adam and Erik were in charge of selecting the wines and Kathy was responsible for picking up the food.

"3 Niagara region Rieslings"

The 3 Niagara region Rieslings that they selected were as follows –

2009 Cave Springs “Dolomite” Riesling, $16.95, available only at Cave Springs (i.e. no LCBO listing)

2009 Fielding “Lot 17” Riesling, $25.95, available only at Fielding

2009 Tawse Riesling, $19.95, available only at Tawse

All of the Rieslings were off-dry in sweetness and all were screw top bottles. For most White wines I’m more of a fan of screw top enclosures rather than cork; easier to open and you won’t be aging most whites so the cork is of no benefit.

The Cave Springs Riesling had a big aroma of red apple with a hint of lime in the background. The flavour of green apples ran the length of this wine. The wine also had a long lingering finish to it which was really impressive. There was good acidity and it was the least sweet of the three Rieslings we tried. This was also my favourite of three wines without food.
The Fielding Riesling had an interesting nose of pear and smoke. I was surprised to find that peach was the dominate flavour to this wine, as that is not a flavour I usually associate with Riesling. It seemed the sweetest of the three but I found it had the least amount of acidity of the 3 wines so that might have made it seem sweeter than it really was. This was my least favourite on its own and with the food. I will note though that a number of Wine Club members picked this one as their hands down favourite.

The last one was the Tawse Riesling; this was the take home bottle for Wine Club members. The nose on the Tawse was half green apple and half lime; a very German nose to it. The flavours on this one matched the nose perfectly as it was green apple and lime. The acidity and sweetness was dead in the middle between the two other wines. This was my second choice before the food and became my favourite with the food.

Speaking of food, Kathy bought in an interest collection of goodies to sample with the wines. We had cheese and crackers, spicy pepperoni sticks and roasted red pepper hummus with baby pitas. It was quite a range of different tastes and I thought at least one would throw the wines for a loop but all of the food was at least a good pairing if not a great pairing. I was especially surprised at how good the spicy pepperoni sticks were with the Rieslings.

I am usually very harsh on VQA wines as I find they are over-exposed and over priced at the LCBO. I was a nice treat to try three VQA wines that I liked and in some cases like the Tawse, liked a lot.

We aren’t holding a Wine Club in December as that month tends to be stupid busy so our next one won’t be until January.

Cheers!

Mark