Weekend Wine... Gysler Riesling Trocken (Liter)
July 16, 2010 at 11:00 am by Jay
Gysler
Riesling Trocken (Liter)
Rheinhessen, Germany 2009
$15.99 (14.39 today & tomorrow)
The
Wine... As far as we can tell, there is no better value dry
Riesling than the Gysler liter bottle. Quality: outstanding. Price: a
pittance. It is a white to waste a warm afternoon with, to drink over a
long lunch of fresh-water fish, spring greens, little buttery
potatoes.
The
Man... Alex Gysler is the force behind this 12-hectare certified
Biodynamic estate. His wines over the last 3-4 years have gone beyond
satisfying and affordable. The flavors today are zingy, linear, defined,
frankly pretty amazing. And still the wines stay inexpensive. The
change is attributable to farming, and to Gysler's, very hands-off
cellar work. The wines actually stay on the gross lees until shortly
before bottling. No racking, no filtration, just unblemished goodness.
The Land... The Rheinhessen is a difficult area to organize. It isn’t easily fragmentable into clusters of information. It is a large (61,000 acres) and relatively undifferentiated mass of towns that have an unnerving tendency to end with the suffix “heim.” It boggles the mind and resists compartmentalization. Take a map of the area out of context and one is left to look at a Wisconsin-shaped blob bordered on the east and north by the Rhein river. Because wine towns are scattered across a large landmass, the growers who are reshaping the region are often working in isolation from each other, and far from the Rhein. Young idealists at estates like Gysler (in Weinheim), Wittmann (Westhofen), Wagner-Stempel (Siefersheim) and Dr. Heyden (Oppenheim) are creating a degree of recognition for their recently anonymous hometowns.