World Riesling Day!
Celebrating world riesling day with Grosset Polish Hill Clare Valley Riesling and two of my favorite people!
Here at Book + Bottle, we love riesling. You’ll see our riesling cubbies stuffed to the max and constantly rotating through new labels and old standbys. One of our favorite things to do here is to convince our customers that there’s a riesling for every person, preference, palate, and party!
When we heard it was world riesling day, we knew we had to open a killer bottle we’ve been waiting to open for a special occasion - Grosset Polish Hill Clare Valley Riesling. At $54 a bottle, it’s not a Tuesday night wine for most of us…but is an excellent choice if you’re trying to impress dinner guests, celebrating something fun, or just need to treat yourself (that’s what we were doing!).
While riesling originated in the hills of Germany, the Grosset winery is located in South Australia. This is one of those cases where vintners found a secondary location that grows grapes in a distinct but über desirable way! We love that they grow their grapes organically and let them ripen to their optimum fruitiness so you get all nature’s flavor out of each bunch! (Other wineries might pick their grapes too early so they keep that refreshing acidity that riesling is known for, but then you lose a lot of the ripe fruit flavors.)
Polish Hill is one of four vineyards belonging to the Grosset Winery. It is planted on shale and clay marl over blue slate; a 100% ‘hard rock’ site. Its challenging rocky profile results in low yields with an average of two bottles of wine per vine being produced. Consisting of three riesling clones, this low-yielding vineyard produces strikingly powerful and persistent dry riesling. The wine is a curious balance between lightness and explosive flavor. How can something so ethereal hang on to all of your senses for so long? You’ll notice a distinct creamy texture, pleasing minerality combining salt and steel, an interesting floral muskiness, and fresh fruit like lime, white peach, and delicate pineapple. This wine is bone dry, wildly complex, and utterly delicious.
(More on Polish Hill and Grosset here).
We drank the first half of this here in the store, to celebrate and recover from a long week - no food needed to enjoy the complexity and the magic of the wine in the glass. The rest of the wine I took home to enjoy with some leftover Chinese noodles, which complemented the veggies and sliced through the oily sauce perfectly.
If you don’t have $54 to spend on one bottle, here’s a list of some of our other favorite dry rieslings that we have in stock most of the time:
Jim Barry Watervale (Clare Valley, Australia) $15
Dandelion Enchanted Garden (Eden Valley, Australia) $22
Von Buhl Bone Dry Riesling (Pfalz, Germany) $22
Huber Riesling Terrassen (Traisental, Austria) $17
Eroica Riesling (Washington State, USA) $20
