What's your favourite wine? Here's mine.
This Riesling is a really nice wine because it answers one or two questions people often ask which is "what's your favourite wine?"
And, well, this is probably one of my favorite wines of all time. It's not that it's necessarily the best wine I've ever had or that it's one I rate above everything else, for price, value or anything like that.
It's just that I absolutely love it and it kind of ties into part of my own past in the wine trade that I really remember with great fondness. It's a German wine and it's white, both of which are kind of not expected when people talk about their favourites.
However, it's made by a friend of mine, Andreas and it was one of the first wines that I ever sourced and shipped from overseas and I still think it's as good today as it ever has been.
As for the qualities of the wine itself, it's interesting because it's a blend of premier and grand cru vineyard sites in the Rhineland-Pfalz region, right down in the southwest of Germany, towards the border with France, and quite close to the Luxembourg border.
That's interesting geographically because heading from west to east there's this mountain range called the Vosges mountains and they protect Alsace from a lot of the weather fronts, keeping the area dry.
In Germany, the mountain range fades away into the Rhine river but up from the south of the Rhine in germany comes a different range of mountains called the Haardt heart mountains which do something similar, protecting this area from some of the more extreme weather conditions.
The area was originally an ocean floor so it's quite mineral rich, where the vineyards are now, though they've not yet found any dinosaur fossils despite my persistent asking!
Another really interesting thing about this region is that in the mid-19th century, it was extremely famous around the world for producing the most expensive wines.
Looking at the historic records of wine traders like Berry Brothers & Rudd in London, they were the most expensive wines traded, before Bordeaux had been classified in 1855.
They even celebrated the opening of the Suez canal with wines from one of the Grand Cru vineyard sites in and around the town of Deidesheim, which is where this wine is made.
The Win Win is a fantastic wine. Really bright, crisp engaging, it's textural so you can feel lots of different parts of your mouth being engaged by the wine and then the flavors are just delicious.
Lemon, lime, Apple a little bit of the sherbet flavour. It's brilliant accompanied by poultry, duck, seafood or shellfish, and really very good any time of the day, perhaps not breakfast.
It really it is one of my most favourites. The only thing might be that it's a very tall bottle so it doesn't quite fit in the fridge very easily, so you might have to make some adjustments.
I really, really love this Win Win Riesling and I hope that you do too.