The Wine Knows

During our judging Saturday of 116 Pacific Northwest Rieslings, we had just one corked wine. In fact, the far bigger problem was oxidation.

One might see this as a good trend that we found just one wine infected with TCA, the compound that makes a wine smell like a wet dog sleeping on rotting cardboard in a musty basement.

Going into our big Riesling judging today, I figured we would be able to get a sense of where the Pacific Northwest stands in alternative closures. With Riesling being a white wine that generally will be drunk in its youth, there would be a greater likelihood of alternatives such as screwcaps and synthetics.

One item of note as we prep for our Riesling competition this weekend: The noble white wine grape of Germany and Alsace is produced throughout the Pacific Northwest. In fact, I'm a bit amazed at how many various appellations are represented on wine bottles.

One of the versatilities with Riesling also is one of its perception problems with consumers. This came to light as I entered wine for our Riesling judging into our databases.

Very few Rieslings provide signals about whether the wine is dry, off-dry or sweet.

The Wine Press Northwest crew is prepping for a Riesling judging this weekend, and I am salivating as I enter wines into our database.

While Chardonnay still is far and away the most popular white wine in America, I have to think that Riesling is the greatest.

Chateau Ste. Michelle not only makes the most Riesling in the world - but it also produces some of the finest. This was proven once again this afternoon in Southern California.

Ste. Michelle's 2007 Dry Riesling won the sweepstakes award for best white wine of the Riverside International Wine Competition, which concluded this afternoon.

I don't normally pay great attention to "wine award" issues conducted by other publications, but I was reading the latest issue of Seattle Magazine (a favorite publication of mine) and can't help but comment.

Most of the "Washington Wine" awards were fairly straight-forward (if heavy on Walla Walla picks). But when I ran across one category, I had to close the magazine and walk away.

I came across this blog item from a blog on Washington and Oregon wines called Beyond the Bottle. The author wants to know why wine writers complain about alcohol levels, then do not include them in reviews.

Great question.

Between the mammoth amounts of Riesling that Ste. Michelle makes (more than 1 million cases as a company) and the excitement that Randall Grahm has brought to Washington with Pacific Rim Riesling (130,000 cases in 2007), somehow Hogue occasionally falls off my radar, even though the Yakima Valley winery produces about 200,000 cases of Washington's second-favorite white wine.

A story buzzing around the wine world the past two days confirms what we already know (from common sense as well as similar studies): The more expensive we think a wine is, the more impressed we are.

Another story that has been overlooked addresses a similar subject. Under blind conditions, wine drinkers can tell no difference between a wine under screwcap and one under cork. That is presuming the one under cork isn't tainted with TCA. But when Oregon State University researchers gave consumers a choice of wines with screwcaps or corks, they favored the cork.