Ask most wine geeks for their favorite grape.  Once they’ve gone on and on about how that’s an impossible question to answer, they’ll eventually admit the answer is Riesling.  Seriously, for many of us who have made a point of trying as many wines as we can, it always comes back to Riesling. I have yet to go to a Riesling-focused industry tasting where I haven’t thought to myself, and overheard someone ask, “Why do I ever drink anything else?”

But I don’t like sweet wine!

OK, for starters, not all Riesling is sweet.  In fact, a lot of it isn’t. But we’ll get to that later.  Why don’t you like sweet wines? Do you like cocktails? They’re almost always at least a little sweet.  Sodas? Fruit juices? Heck, most beer has some sweetness. We LOVE sweet drinks, but for some reason, we’ve decided sweet wine is off-limits.

This is undoubtedly because of the stigma of wines like White Zinfandel and the wine coolers (Bartles & James, anyone?) we drank before we graduated to “real” wine.  We felt we had to leave the sweet stuff at the door when we entered the club of grown-assed-adult wine drinkers. Well, I’m here to tell you that you don’t. 

Again, the nerdiest wine folks — the very ones who people are intimidated by when it comes to this sort of thing — love the HELL out of Riesling and plenty of other sweet wines.

Now, having said that, there is a condition: the wine must have plenty of acid to carry this off.  I discuss the matter of acid further here, but acid is key, and Riesling has it in spades. And it is this combination of sweetness and bright acidity that makes these wines so delicious, so refreshing, so… crushable.

It’s often the only decent wine on a bad list.

OK, so I belong to a Facebook group of wine nerds who, among other things, like to post and poke fun at photos of lame wine lists (not proud about this).  Lists that are made up of boring wines that you couldn’t pay us to drink. But you know what one wine is almost always on those lists? Freaking Chateau St. Michelle Riesling.  Like 9 times out of 10. And that wine is flat-out good. Sure, there’s better. Heck, they make better ones themselves. But it is absolutely a beacon of light on so many otherwise awful wine lists.  

In fact, you have to try hard to find a bad Riesling.  Sure, they’re out there, but I swear, as someone who has tasted literally tens of thousands of wines in my life, I’ve had far, far fewer bad examples of Riesling than I have of any other grape.

But when it’s great…

And it often is, it’s an exotic blend of citrus and peaches that is at once luxurious, nuanced, and entirely refreshing.  It also happens to go with basically everything. I often get asked for a wine recommendation by a table where everyone is having a different entrée.  My first choice is typically Riesling. It has the depth of flavor to hold up to meats (nothing goes better with pork), and the crispness and levity to match seafood dishes.  And if the food is a bit sweet, like any Asian dishes, a sweeter version will stand up to it.

So you told me they’re not all sweet?

There’s actually an entire spectrum of sweetness when it comes to Riesling.  From mouth-puckering, bone-dry examples from Eden and Claire Valleys in Australia, to riper, but still quite dry versions in Austria.  Richer still and sometimes dry, sometimes a bit sweet in Alsace, France. The typically semi-sweet examples found throughout the Pacific Northwest, to the lusciously sweet-yet-clean-as-a-whistle beauties from the Mosel in Germany.   And those are just a few examples. So many styles to choose from, and almost always absolutely delicious.

So get over it.  Riesling deserves your unconditional love.