Bree Riesling 2009

I know that I have been a bit slack in the past couple of months in producing posts and reviews. Frankly, it has been quite a busy time for me. I’ve took some time and catch up on things around the house (of which I’m still woefully behind) and begin marching forward on some other things. I finally got the results of my WSET Advanced Class (Level 3) back in which I passed with distinction (that’s a technical term that means a 85 or above). I’ve developed an adanced class on wine tasting for presentation at the winery and finally, last week a colleague and myself drove Alyssa (my Corvette for those that don’t know) up to Providence for the Society of Wine Educators annual conference.

These events always charge me up and get me very excited about my work in the field I’m in and this one was no exception. In fact, my colleague and I are in the process of putting together a proposal to do a presentation during next year’s conference. We’ll see how that turns out but as of right now I have a good feeling about things.

Of course, because I’m so excited about things, I felt that taking on a challenging wine for the first wine back would be an awesome idea (:roll eyes:). The reason I say this is not because the wine itself is very challenging (it wasn’t) but because it is German. Now I haven’t reviewed any German wines prior to this point, mostly because of the complexity of German wine laws. I don’t have time to get into it in this post, you’ll notice that I’m already three paragraphs in and I haven’t even really talked about the wine yet. However, I’ll give you a 50,000 foot view so that you’ll have a least a glimpse of what’s going on here.

In Germany, there are two completely separate but equally important hierarchies of quality being applied to wine. The first is a Quality Wine Produced in a Specific Region (QWPSR) ranking where the wine meets specific quality criteria similar to other European countries. Then there are also geographical classifications which pertain to where the wine was actually produced.

In the case of the Bree Riesling, the wine is a Qualitätswein bestimmter Anbaugebiete (QbA) from the Pfalz wine region. Anbaugebiete is the German term for a designated quality region such as Pfalz and being a Qualitätswein places it a step down from the top rung on the QWPSR hierarchy which is Prädikatswein. The sum total of all this is that the Bree Riesling is the equivalent of Vin de Pays were it made in France. That being said, this is not a horrible wine even though it is not a wine that I would go out of my way to buy. It is a light, crisp Riesling that will go down well on a warm summer afternoon although it doesn’t carry that same refreshing quality as its Alsatian counterparts. The best I can do is to give this wine a 2 out of 5 rating.

Tasting notes:

This is a clear, medium(+) intensity, lemon colored wine with legs. It has a clean, youthful, medium(-) intense nose with aromas of lime and mineral. It is an off-dry wine with medium(+) acidity, medium alcohol, no tannin and medium body. It has medium intense flavors of lime, green apple and mineral with a medium length finish. It is an acceptable, inexpensive wine that is ready to drink now but will not improve in the bottle.