Sweet White Wine By Any Other Name Would be Riesling

Another month brings more adventures in Wine Club. This month brought the sweet, sweet offerings of Riesling. Now full disclosure, I am not a Riesling fan. It's usually way too sweet for me. When it comes to whites, the drier the better in my opinion. Now, maybe if summer had actually arrived with sunshine and heat a crispy, fruity white would be appealing. But alas, that is not the case.

The spread of the hostess had a lot of delectable goodies that are supposed to pair surprisingly well with Riesling.

The first wine was from the New York Finger Lakes Region:

Of the five wines, this was my favorite ... and it's probably due to the word "dry" on the label. It was definitely the driest one of the evening. Crisp, appley, it was pleasant. Something that would pair well with spicy food to cut the heat.

The second wine came from the Alsace region of France.

It smelled like diesel and clearly reflected the terrior of the region. This wine did not work for me. I couldn't handle more than a few sips to taste it.

The next one helped erase the taste of the first one, but it was super super sweet ... because it was the ringer:

I didn't think this was too bad, it had a floral angle to it and was refreshing ... but it may have been I just needed something to take away the finish of the second one.

Our fourth wine was a sweet Oregon wine:

It was really sweet, perhaps the sweetest wine of the evening. But again, sweet wine = not my thing.

Before the fifth wine, we got dessert.  A great GF pound cake with coconut sherbet ... it was really, really good. It's amazing how GF foods are pretty much processed and created so that you don't miss the gluten:

The cake was grilled, which added another nice dimension.

The final wine brought us back to Europe. It was our German Riesling.

This was very similar to the second one, so clearly reflecting a European terrior. Not only did it have a diesel quality, but also a rubber quality. The coconut sherbet made this somewhat bareable, but again, nothing I'll be investing in any time soon. 

For those who like Rieslings, you may want to try these ... as for me, I'll stick to my dry wines.