Riesling

Riesling is a white grape variety and varietal appellation of wines grown historically in Germany (see German wine), Alsace (France), Austria, and northern Italy. It is a very old grape, first documented in 1435, in which year the storage inventory of the Counts of Katzenelnbogen (a small principality on the Rhine) lists the purchase of six barrels of riesslingen from a Rüsselsheim vintner. The modern word Riesling was first documented in 1552 when it was mentioned in Hieronymus Bock's Latin herbal.

The most expensive wines made from Riesling are late harvest dessert wines, produced by letting the grapes hang on the vines well past normal picking time. Through evaporation caused by the fungus Botrytis cinerea ("noble rot") or by freezing, as in the case of ice wine (in German, Eiswein), water is removed and the resulting wine offers richer layers on the palate. These concentrated wines have more sugar (in extreme cases hundreds of grams per litre), more acid (to give balance to all the sugar), more flavor, and more complexity. These elements combine to make wines which are amongst the most long lived of all white wines. The beneficial use of "noble rot" was discovered in the late 18th century at Schloss Johannisberg. Permission from the Abbey of Fulda, which owned the vineyard, to start picking the grapes arrived too late and the grapes had begun to rot, yet it turned out that the wine made from them was still of excellent quality.