[Tasted during WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 5: Alsace]

I’m sad I didn’t have more time to spend just tasting minuscule sips of this wine, whose colour I haven’t seen for a wine in a very long time, and the same colour you’d swear was more akin to sherry than a Riesling. Add a Sélection de Grains Nobles wine to the list of wines that are so rare, such that getting to taste one is simultaneously enough and not enough.

Fuck.

It was reminiscent to the first wine in our flight of three, in that there was a real evolved pomaceous fruit character, with bruised red apple and dried pear that met with dried peaches, some apricots, honey, spice, mushroom, and apple jam.… read more

[Tasted during WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 5: Alsace]

Continuing on our speed tasting train. This is the brightest wine of our flight of three, and also the palest. Our flight of three was obviously chosen to display three different styles or quality levels of Riesling (the Alsatian grape we hadn’t tried yet in that session), the one previous to this being a Grand Cru Alsatian Riesling, this one being one at the regular Alsace AOP level, and the third being a Grand Cru Sélection de Grains Nobles.

This is a great example of its style, where bright Alsatian Riesling is mouth-commanding and almost abrasive, reminding me of a young and irritatingly chipper business-forward politician or Daenerys Targaryen.… read more

[Tasted during WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 5: Alsace]

We literally start the last flight of three wines with six minutes left in class, so everyone’s struggling to speed taste, sort of like that scene in the first book of Harry Potter where Hermione has to figure out what potion Harry has to drink in order to make it through to save the world from Apothic Red, or whatever. They may have cut that scene from the film?

Originally there were simply three appellations for Alsace, and you may still very well group them in that way: there’s regular Alsace, there’s Crémant d’Alsace (sparkling), and then there’s the Grand Cru appellation which implies higher quality than the regular, but of course it’s still a subject of controversy.… read more