When you live and breathe Riesling, one of the recurring story that we talk about all the time is the many different types (read residual sugars) of Rieslings and how they all have a place at your wine table. This is a theme that we have tried to convey on the package of our main line of Riesling through the clear use of descriptors on the label such as “Dry” or “Sweet” because we want our customers to understand what they are buying (not a given in the wine business sometimes). For the record most folks out there told us we were crazy to use the word “Sweet” on a label and now you can see the numbers of wineries following our lead. Our leadership in this arena is also shown in the very early use of the International Riesling Foundation taste (sweetness) scale on all our Rieslings back labels – a scale that we’ve helped develop with Dan Berger and the team at the IRF.

Why all that matters would you ask? Well, it does matter (at least to us) because it is not always easy to convince some crowds to love, buy and sell several types of Rieslings. we have many cro-magnon folks out there that either think that all Rieslings are sweet and/or believe that sweet wines are waaayyy below them. Often those prehistoric thinkers believe that consumers needs to be categorized as a “cab drinker” or a “dry white drinker”; they love to categorize the world of drinkers like marketers categorize populations (by the way try the Claritas prizm marketing segmentation to see how those people like to categorize everything). If you are like me and enjoy many ways of life, you probably understand that there is a time for dry aromatic whites, a time for sweeter wines and a time for a red wine (OK, maybe not many occasion for red wines but I have to be open minded since this is what I am preaching). This is why I do not believe that most wine drinkers fall into one type of Riesling and that Riesling has to be sweet – I believe most people like many styles of Riesling though, I admit, wine drinkers might have a primary attachment to any given kind. There is a Riesling for Everything has we say at Pacific Rim that all have different Riesling for being.

Based on the unequivocal principle that all Riesling are not born equal and they are made for different occasions and food pairing, we are claiming that all decent wine lists and all decent wine shelves HAVE TO CARRY SEVERAL STYLES OF RIESLINGS and that, at a minimum, the price of entry in order to graduate from prehistoric behavior is to carry a Dry, a medium Dry (often just labeled “Riesling” in the USA) and a Sweet Riesling – 3 Rieslings for being. Note 1: a Sparkling and a dessert style in the set would be swell, but I won’t get mad at you for not having them – at least not yet. Note 2: Several Riesling regions (Mosel, Washington State, Eden Valley Australia etc…) would also be nice.