Like many wine writers but unlike most American consumers, I regard Riesling as the world's greatest white wine grape. 
Perhaps because Riesling has been badly undervalued among mainstream consumers in the United States, it has also been under-produced by American vintners. California's wine industry has essentially cut bait on Riesling, and the only two states that have seemed to take it seriously during the past decade have been New York and Washington, though good things are happening in Michigan and a few other places as well.
Perhaps the most notable of these is Oregon, and my column next month will focus on the fine Rieslings that are now being made in the Willamette Valley. But before turning to the swelling ranks of Rieslings coming out of Oregon, I should address the skeptics among you with my argument for Riesling's supremacy among white grape varieties.
Riesling has its devotees in the United States, but they are still greatly outnumbered by doubters. Yet I maintain that, while other grapes can measure up to Riesling in one or another of the following respects, no other grape can come close to matching the following list of virtues:
Almost all renditions of Riesling are terrific within six months of being vinified, and yet there is probably no other white variety that ages so well. By that last point I mean not only that Riesling can hang on and still be passable after years in the bottle, but that it actually gets better, developing all sorts of complexities and actually passing through a whole range of phases, each of which can be quite wonderful in its own right.
This capacity can be found in sweeter Rieslings from Germany or Alsace, but likewise in bone dry ones from Western Australia or the Clare or Eden Valleys in South Australia. Two of the greatest 
experiences of my life as a wine taster have been sipping Leo Buring Rieslings from the 1970s in Australia and several bottlings of Riesling Auslese from the 1971 vintage in Germany. No grape can match Riesling in its capacity to become something utterly different than what it was at the outset--but equally compelling at both points.
Riesling can be marvelous with virtually no residual sugar, and wines such as Trimbach's Clos St. Hune from Alsace or Grosset's Polish Hill bottling from Clare Valley make this utterly indisputable. At the other end of the sweetness scale, a Riesling-based Trockenbeerenauslese or Eiswein from Germany would surely be my single favorite dessert wine, besting even the best renditions of Sauternes or Tokaji.
Equally remarkable is the fact that Riesling can excel at every point between the ends of the dry-to-sweet continuum. Ask a true Riesling lover whether he or she prefers German wines at the ripeness level of Kabinett or Spätlese or Auslese--and watch what happens. There's a good chance that the person will just sputter incoherently, paralyzed by ambivalence, because Riesling rocks at every level of sweetness. No other grape can hit every note on the scale like Riesling can.
Winemakers love to fiddle with their wines. They can't help themselves, it seems sometimes. Twiddling the dials and tweaking their wines with a little of this or a little of that is a compulsive commonplace. They love to blend in 5% of some other grape, or to perform some transformative technique on a particular little batch of wine and then see how that works as a blending agent to enhance the rest of the juice.
But, tellingly, winemakers almost never fiddle with Riesling. When was the last time you saw a Riesling that had some other grape blended into it? Even the Aussies--who will blend anything with anything--won't touch Riesling. It has a coherence of its own that is unlike any other white grape. Any blending agent would diminish it or muddy the finished wine.
On the red side, Pinot Noir offers an analogous case in point (when did you last see a blend of Pinot with anything else?). But winemakers love to play with different barrels when crafting their Pinots, whereas almost nobody would mess around with oak when crafting Riesling, which is simply the least "crafted" of all wines. Winemakers never tire these days of telling wine writers how they make their wine in the vineyard rather than the cellar, and this has become the shibboleth of an entire generation of winemakers. Often it turns out to be mere lip service, and if you have a sufficiently long conversation with many winemakers, it will turn out that what they actually do belies what they say they do. But virtually nobody messes with Riesling.
Of all white wine varieties, Riesling produces the most individuated wine. For true wine lovers, this is an unalloyed virtue. For those with a merely commercial interest in wine, it is a vice, since the road to mass sales in any consumable product runs the way of uniformity. Every bottle of Riesling tastes different from every other bottle of Riesling. This has hampered its appeal to the consumer mainstream, and though Riesling will never garner the level of sales enjoyed by the vastly more uniform "international" style of vaguely sweet, oaky Chardonnay, Riesling's superiority in critical terms is undiminished by this.
Of course, one of the reasons why Rieslings are so individuated is that they aren't subjected to the standardizing effects of fermentation and ageing in oak. But there is more to it than that, as you'll discover if you compare a broad selection of Rieslings to a group of unoaked wines like Sauvignon Blancs from France's Loire Valley or Marlborough in New Zealand. I love the wines from both regions, but they are nowhere near as nuanced or variegated as Rieslings from Alsace, Austria or Germany.
This is largely a function of Riesling's peerless "transparency," a term that is sometimes used to refer to the grape's ability to 
convey aromas and flavors originating in the peculiarities of the site in which it is grown. I would refuse to live in a world without Sauvignon Blanc, but the fact remains that most of the aroma and flavor you'll find in Sauvignon is intrinsic to the grape and not imparted by the vineyard. Differences in soil and climate will show you different facets of Sauvignon, but it is predominantly Sauvignon that you are 'seeing' when tasting from one bottle to the next.
With fine Riesling, however, you can seemingly "see" right through the grape to savor the sun, soil, and slant of the land that 
impart the character of a particular place. Moreover, the delicacy that lets Riesling exhibit nuances tied to a place also lets it show shadings from differing treatment by winemakers, and consequently you'll find another layer of personality differences even when tasting wines drawn from a single vineyard, whether a Grand Cru site in Alsace or one like the Wehlener Sonnenuhr in Germany's Mosel Valley.
There's more that I could say to make the case for Riesling's supremacy. For example, I haven't even addressed its greatness as a partner for food, which is even more impressive when you consider the fact that Riesling is also among the world's best aperitif wines. But since I notice that each of my points is longer than the one preceding it, I should call it quits before this turns into a full-fledged rant.
If you are a skeptic where Riesling is concerned, I hope that these points will at least soften you sufficiently to get you started tasting for yourself. That is of course the only way to really establish anything for oneself where wine is concerned. I'll be back in March with recommendations of a bunch of impressive Rieslings from Oregon. Between now and then, if you've got a comment--or a counter-argument to the points made here--please write to me at mfranz@winereviewonline.com
