By Anto Coates
Why do people either love or hate riesling?
Why no middle ground?
It's a basic human
truth that love is borne of understanding, while hate stems from a lack of it.
We only need to look at the high and low watermarks of human interaction –
romance and racism. The better you know and understand your wife, the deeper
your love grows. The less you know about people of a different culture, the
more you push them away through anti-social behaviour (euphemism alert).
Riesling is much
like romance and racism (and it has nothing to do with its beauty or the colour
of its skin). Let me try and explain my way out of this preposterous statement...
Amazingly, I've
never met a single person with a broad knowledge of wine who doesn't love
riesling. This is particularly strange given the subjective nature of wine and
how eagerly detractors of nearly every other variety offer their services pro bono. Several respected commentators
publicly or privately shun sauvignon blanc (in New Zealand it’s strangely fashionable
to do so), and merlot is still convalescing after its attempted assassination
was caught on film....but no wine lover worth his salty sherry has ever fired
so much as a shot across riesling’s bow in my presence. (It’s a good thing too,
I’d defend it fiercely. There’s something about the name that makes it seem timid
and frail: Riesling. Duckling. Sapling.)
Yet amongst everyday
‘wine drinkers’ (as opposed to ‘wine thinkers’, to make a simple distinction) riesling
detractors congregate like wasps round a grape crush. Riesling is dismissed out
of hand, usually for asinine reasons like being ‘too sweet’.
So why does riesling
not have a linear progression from indifference, through awareness, past
interest, to understanding and eventually, love? Why is it all or nothing? Mozart’s
music, while it takes time to appreciate fully, isn’t exalted by experts and slated
by novices – nor for that matter are many other aesthetic pleasures, including
other wine varieties. So why riesling?
The most commonly
cited reason behind riesling’s narrow appreciation is that people don’t know
what they’re getting, so they play safe with something else. Riesling can be as
saccharine as a Richard Curtis film or drier than depositions at a fraud trial.
Riesling’s very versatility is its greatest weakness, or so the argument goes.
This might be true
to a point, but these days most bottles of riesling have at least a description
of style on the back label or in some cases the International Riesling Foundation’s
sweetness scale (though these are still rarer than a bureaucrat at 5.31pm). If people are interested, they can usually find out if it's sweet or dry.
The other line trotted
out is that riesling has a reputation hangover from the days of Blue Nun, the largest
fish in a sticky sea
of Liebfraumilch. But
again, while the argument carries some weight for the over-50 crowd, it doesn’t
really work for younger people. My contemporaries and I have never tasted Blue
Nun (and we don’t refer to each other as contemporaries either).
But then it struck
me: The reason people don’t drink riesling is because…well…I don’t drink all
that much riesling either.
Well I do, but
certainly not as much as I should – given how highly I rate it in my imaginary
wine hierarchy. Like many enthusiastic wine drinkers, I hold riesling up as my
favourite white wine. But if I look down the list of wines that I buy to drink,
this affection doesn’t translate into actual sales.
So why the
discrepancy between perception and reality, appreciation and sales? In
advertising, one known drawback of holding a consumer research focus group is
that people often distort their realities to impress the group. They’ll say "I usually
cook at home with fresh ingredients and hardly ever eat fast food”, because
they know they’ll sound naff if they admit to scoffing McDonalds 3 times a
week. People also have egocentric memory biases, which is a tendency to recall
past events to suit themselves favourably, i.e. that they were regarded as the
best player in their school cricket team.
So we know that people distort what they know to be true to appear better in front of
others, and they also deceive themselves through egocentric memory. Is it
possible that because we regard riesling as the drink of a wine sophisticate,
we both think we drink it all the time and make claims to that effect?
which begs the next question: Do we really love
it as much as we think we do? Perhaps therein lies the answer to the love versus
hate issue. Perhaps it's not that there is no middle ground, it's just that there appears not to be. Riesling lovers may tend to overstate their love of it because
they think as wine experts they are supposed to love it. Maybe many of us would be better off saying we like riesling?
While
unpredictability and bad reputation undoubtedly play a role in riesling’s
sluggish sales, I wonder if I’ve hit on something here. Do all the myriad wine
writers blacking out column inches whinging about how the public don’t
appreciate riesling really practice what they preach? Do they let their wallets
do the talking?
Do you? There’s no
time like the Summer of Riesling to
find out…