Wine of the Day: Idol Ridge Riesling 2013

Hello again. Tonight, I shall open a bottle of wine, namely this one:

The front of the bottle

The back of the bottle

This I bought along with several others from this winery at their booth at the 2015 Altamont Apple & Wine Festival. I collected quite a few Rieslings at that event, partly because I was doing comparison studies between the 'dry' and 'semi-dry' Rieslings available from several of those vintners who were offering both. I was interested to see what the relative range of sweetness would be between the two. As I recall, most of those that I sampled in this way had a more or less pronounced distance between their 'dry' and 'semi-dry' Riesling vintages. For the record, Heron Hill seemed to me to achieve the most reasonable separation, narrower than the others.

So I expect this vintage to be fairly sweet. Let's see...

Nose: somewhat fruity, a little pear-like, maybe.

Taste: a bit of a bite on the tip of the tongue; otherwise seems fairly smooth. Definitely on the sweetish side of things, though I'm not sure I'd say that it's really sweet (YMMV, obviously). I suppose the placement of the little indicator on the scale on the back label is accurate, though. Sweet enough that I won't be in a hurry to my second glass, but not so sweet that I'd feel overwhelmed.

Sweetness is obviously not the only palate-related topic we could consider here. Just a moment--I need to clean my eyeglasses so I can taste the wine better... There. At first I thought the bouquet hinted of pear, but on the palate, now I'm thinking more apricot/mandarin orange. Finish has perhaps just a hint of grapefruit.

Verdict: It's all right. Several years ago, I went through a Riesling phase. As I said in the last wine post, I'm much more attracted to Spanish reds nowadays, for example. But I never entirely gave up Rieslings. This one I think is a reasonable specimen of the type.