Lauer Sekt Saar 2020
Stein “Blauschiefer” Riseling Trocken Mosel 2022
Wechsler “Kirchspiel” Rhinehessen Riesling 2019
Lauer “Fass 12” Unterstenberg Saar Riesling 2022

When I was back East last month my close friend and confidant Jason asked me a sensitive and probing question: do I still hesitate to stock riesling at the shop? My answer was neither a resounding “no,” nor a wholehearted “yes.” Amongst the cognoscenti, riesling provides everything we want in a glass of white wine, covering a spectrum of expressions, from wines that are gobsmackingly bone-dry, mineral-driven tooth enamel stripping, sometimes fizzy but mostly not, to fruity, long-lived bottles that mysteriously become less and less sweet-tasting as they slumber gracefully in your wine fridge. Ask your garden variety sommelier about their desert island white wine, and the answer, nine times out of ten, is riesling.

The anxiety that some folks feel when it comes to sweet wines is palpable, as if admitting to liking a sweet wine is an infantile, regressive trait, betraying their hard-won adult, no-sugar-allowed palate. Others are filled with worry that a glass of such a wine will throw them out of ketosis and cause their brains to fall out. And there’s always the possibility that they’ve just never experienced a good bottle of riesling, fruity or dry, and extrapolate from their limited exposure that all riesling must taste just like the garbage that once traumatized them. I doubt that this advisory is sufficiently anxiolytic, but all of the rieslings we’re tasting tonight are dry-tasting.

Some of the most riveting dry white wines in the shop are indeed bottles of riesling, and yet convincing folks to purchase one often feels like a Sisyphean task. It’s a task that I’m up for. If no one has offered you a good bottle of dry riesling, you may eye the bottle I will invariably proffer to you with suspicion, suspecting that I’m trying to pawn off some treacly sweet Blue Nun rubbish. The first German wine I ever tasted was a stale, long-opened bottle of Blue Nun that I spied in the cupboard and as I took a clandestine swig of it, I instantly regretted doing so. The truth is that today, most German wine drinkers under 40 prefer dry wines, and Germany is the largest market for sauvignon blanc in the world. A generation or two ago, the most vaunted expressions of riesling were typically fruity; today, many are dry. Ok, some of the dry wines may contain a few grams of natural residual sugar, but you’d never know it as these wines typically have a counterbalancing low pH and high total acidity.

Tonight, we’re tasting five dry rieslings, ranging from reasonably priced to the not. Some bear the word “trocken” on the label, a reliable indicator of a wine’s style (trocken means “dry” in German) while others do not. We’re featuring two bottles from one of the cult masters of dry-tasting riesling in the Saar, Florian Lauer, whose wines may, just may, begin to erode your riesling phobia.