German wines 🇩🇪and Belgians🇧🇪. Somehow our love is not that big. And I have always been wondering why🤨. Next to our Belgian beers 🍻we drink loads of French, Italian, Spanish and even Portuguese and new world wines but no Germans wines? Why?
Well, I've heard it hundreds of times: "OMG, Riesling! Do you really mean that sweet rubbish my grandmother used to drink? Disgusting😱!". As far as I remember my grandmother never drank the cheap sweet bulk wine commonly known as "Liebfraumilch👰", but it seems quite a lot still do these days🤷.
So as a wine geek I bought it a few times to calibrate my palate😉😇.
And for those who are not familiar with this holy juice, you can find it at the bottom shelves in the supermarket for less than 2 Euro! And yes of course my friends were right!
For 2 Euro you better drink a bottle of Coke.
Coke has a way better sweet-acidity balance and even the
length of the finish of a Coke is phenomenal compared to that wine in which I could not distinguish any Riesling qualities😩.
So when a few weeks ago good friends of mine were like "What Riesling, is that the sweet 🤬my ex-wife used to drink (!?)" Yes, I noticed some variants are circulating🤓, I decided it was time for some action and to cure them from the “Liebfraumilch-complex”.🙈
When I got invited yesterday for diner at their home (safely in our Covid😷-bubble, don't worry) and they said they were going to prepare a Chicken Marsala, I got armed and ready.
We started with a 2014 Riesling Sekt 🍾with Flaschengäring (this is German for Champagne Method) from a small Mösel Weingut, Achim Dernst. Although this bottle was already around 5 years in my cellar it was still full of tasty green apple 🍏and candied lime 🍋aromas and it had a nice buttery/creamy finish.
Jumping to that spicy Indian chicken we had two options. A dry fresh 2017 VDP Saar Riesling of Van Volxem and a 2012 Spätlese Halbtrocken (like off-dry) of again Dernst im Mösel.
When tasting the Van Volxem one my friends shared my feeling of “instant summer happiness poored in a glass☀️". Paired with the chicken however the lady of the house 👸preferred the roundness and candied apricot🍑 and beeswax 🐝aromas of the spätlese. The sweetness also nicely counterbalanced the spiciness🌶 of the Marsala curry. However the man of the house👩🚒, preferred the freshness and high intensity flavours of the Von Volxen. The intensity and pureness of this wine was able to outwin from the power of the dish. And that's quite a performance in this case 💪.
And for me? Well, I was happy☺️. I did not have to choose between both of the wines and as a bonus I got an order from them to buy some new Riesling. Mission accomplished! 👌