Kim and Tonic

Welcome, everyone! This is the first post of my lovely new blog. I’ve imported everything from my old beer and wine blogs here so that you can surf the posts at your leisure without the trouble of blog-hopping and so my brilliance can be amassed in one spot.

This post is a review of the bestest of all best Rieslings I’ve ever had, dedicated to the lovely Dr. B for her naming brilliance: new blog’s name comes courtesy of Dr. B’s brainworkings.

Wine: Frisk Riesling
Vintage: 2010
Region: Victoria, Australia
Grapes involved: Riesling
Color: fairly clear with light golden hints
Cost: $11.99
Food pairings: It could do spicy, sweet, savory, cheesy, beefy, chocolatey or nothing at all. Who needs food when one has wine like this?

This wine is my current favorite wine on the planet. It’s the first wine I’ve ever believed I could consume in case-sized amounts. It’s light and sparkling and slightly acidic and slightly sweet-but-still-dry-ish and, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes.

The scent is a wild combination of powdered sugar, jasmine, and all kinds of citrus-y things with bits of guava and tropical fruits of that ilk thrown in. It’s glorious and wonderful.* And I do mean powdered sugar (icing sugar for the Canadians out there): I never really noticed that powdered sugar has its own smell until I smelled this wine and had powdered sugar come to mind specifically.

Flavor-wise, it’s peach and jasmine and pear predominantly, with bits of tangerine, guava, passionfruit, grass, and something that hand-on-heart I think might be bubblegum. It’s maybe, maybe off-dry, slightly sweet in a manner that isn’t cloying and isn’t dessert-like. It has a really nice, bright acidity to it, which helps pick up the citrus-y fruity notes.

Bonus: it sparkles.

Like, it’s not a bubbly wine: this is not Champagne’s next  knock-off. The label calls it a “Prickly” Riesling, which I think works. There’s enough CO2 to make tiny little bubbles all over the glass, some of which float up through the wine and play on the tongue and all that sort of fun stuff, but that’s it.

I really do honestly think this wine is just about perfect. It’s my current standard for all other Rieslings – they have a lot to live up to now.

Please note: my photography skills are still  lacking. One day, this will be a much better, clearer picture with an honest-to-goodness readable label and everything.
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*I would beg and plead for a perfume that smells like this, but my skin kills jasmine and sugar faster than you can say “caramel factory on fire” (which is about what that would smell like on me). So I’m going to hope that some wonderful person comes up with a way to turn the scent into a candle.