am i learning german?

J

Joel Stewart

Joel Stewart
in the last 8 months i have made a shotgun approach entry into german wines and tried a range of young and semi old rieslings and the common link between them all for me has been that they all have tasted better with a fair amount of aeration. what starts out sweet/tart/bitter/rubber smelling usually balances out with time and becomes fair to very nice drinking. is this just me, or do german freaks already take this into account? (partially wondering if sulphur is the culprit...) case in point is the sekt i am drinking right now: was opened about 6 hrs ago and was horrifyingly sweet, cloying, off-smelling and zero acidity. if i were to judge it then, it would be thrown out....now, with some aeration, acidity has come online very well and this wine has pulled itself together quite nicely. it seems to be a recurrent theme with my german experiences.
 
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
am i learning german?what starts out sweet/tart/bitter/rubber smelling usually balances out with time and becomes fair to very nice drinking.
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Depends on the wine.

When I first started drinking German wine this was definitely the case for me and I prefered lots of aeration on the young wines because they would 'balance' out and become easier to drink.

Now I sometimes feel that with too much aeration they can lose the precision and detail of the flavors.

But, the sulfur and the trapped CO2 are likely to be two things relatively unique to German rieslings that make them respond differently to aeration than the other wines.
 
thanks, Rahsann...it sounds like it's a flavor curve that your palate has adjusted to here. am i right? i mention this because i also recently have been getting into sake, and, despite the dry and sweet distinctions, it's basically a lot sweeter than most wine. once the palate recalibrates, all is well....but there is some adjustment....
 
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
thanks, Rahsann...it sounds like it's a flavor curve that your palate has adjusted to here. am i right?
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Maybe. It could also be that I am looking for different things in the wine now as opposed to when I started with them. I have definitely enjoyed them from the beginning (who could not like the flavors of german riesling!) but found the un-aerated structure more difficult to evaluate when I first started.
 
i find the initial nose and flavors of unaerated wines of any type easy to evaluate....just less accurate over time as to the general personality of the wine. i guess what i am saying with regard to my initial german riesling experiences is that oftentimes the acidity which is supposed to be so prevalent in these wines takes hours to a day of the bottle being open for my palate to find it becoming a part of the wine's raison d'etre (not to mention off notes blowing off). could of course depend on the wine....but then again, it's a trend across various wines of various age that made me post the query.
 
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