ohhhhhohohohohohoh HO now! send me wine! PLEASE DO SEND ME WINE. what an amazing gift! chateau ste. michelle contacted me and asked if i’d be interested in trying some of their fine wines. why yes. yes, i think i would enjoy that. to come home to a box containing three (3) bottles of different types of riesling, the most beautiful of the white wines… this is happiness. but then LOATH to realize that i cannot just throw each bottle back in succession, as per usual. no, the price comes in review… photography, drinking, thinking (ugh), consideration, writing, all those stupid things that i do all the time. it’s enough to drive someone to drink!! not… heh, not that i am an alcoholic. or anything like that.
three types! a sweet riesling, a medium ‘riesling’ riesling, and a dry riesling. OH! the possibilities! excitement. notice the sweet has the distinct honor of having the surtitle “harvest select”. ah… are we playing favorites here, ste. michelle? probably. probably. actually, it appears the sweet is a new addition to the family, and the others are its older siblings. so new baby, new name.
just as a heads up, i generally prefer dry wines to sweet. i actually prefer red to white, but i do enjoy whites, and rieslings are my favorite. so let’s go into this knowing that the sweet is going to be at a disadvantage here, much like that bitch nancy kerrigan after tonya harding was finished with her.
let us begin with the sweet. this… this guy was pretty sweet. i felt like it was almost a dessert wine. it has a full, sweet flavor, but not so much that it wasn’t tolerable or drinkable. all the rieslings were nice and bubbly, which i enjoy. this one i did not find to be particularly crisp, as it was kind of mired in its sweetness. it was almost like a sticky-sweet fruitiness. and there was a bit of a strange aftertaste. the nosegrope was heavy, sweet, and fruity… and that’s the whole thing in a nutshell. not really my thing… but that didn’t stop me from tearing through that sweet ass.
next we have the middle of the road, semi-sweet, regular riesling riesling. [you may notice that this wine looks exactly like the sweet wine before it! don’t be fooled! i took pictures of each wine. they just happen to be entirely indistinguishable from one another. lame! at least their bottles are distinct.] so! this one was excellent! light, crisp, bubbly, and a good balance of sweet and acidic. it was almost as if they neutralized each other, and i was left with just a bubbly juice. the nosegrope was light and fruity. there was a nice sweet aftertaste. totally refreshing. the overall impression was that this is a nice wine to be with. real pleasant. let’s all hang out together.
and finally, the dry. this guy was a straight up, in your face, no bs wine. it’s not pretentious. it gives you a nice, clear taste of the fruit, and lets it stand on its own. it’s still a bit sweet, as much as the fruitiness demands, but nothing more. it was noticeably less crisp and less refreshing than the medium, but it had the benefit of being the most drinkable of the three. there’s a nice full flavor on the finish, leaving you wanting just one more sip. overall, less impressive to me than the semi-sweet, but still a damn good wine.
these wines are all very much brothers, or sisters, or perhaps even genderless/godless monstrosities sharing the same ancestry. really, they are all different shades of the same face. different shades of grey, perhaps. the same flavor is present throughout them all, and that makes it kind of like a family. a sweet, semi-sweet, and dry family. and i killed each bottle. i killed a family. and i’d do it again. please give me an opportunity to kill again.
if you’d like the opportunity to kill your own bottles of wine, and subsequently feel the sweet relief that is drunkenness, check out chateau ste. michelle online at ste-michelle.com.