Josmeyer Les Pierrets 2008
The Grape: Riesling
The Look: Gold and appealing.
The Nose: Wow! An island full of tropical fruit and citrus stops you in your tracks. Apricot, mango, pineapple, lemon, lime, and green apple. Candied ginger. Some stone and minerality backing, slate.
The Palate: Composed citrus dessert with a tropical coulis. Tastes like a citrus tart with the constituent parts all coming through: lime, lemon, green apple, meringue, mango coulis, a touch of pastry. High acid. Dry, but with a decent amount of residual sugar. I would guess it’s around 5 or 6g/L. That brings out the fruit characteristics even more on the palate and contributes to a round mouthfeel despite the relatively low alcohol for the region (12.5%).
Price Point: 32 EUR / 380 NOK at auction
Terningkast: 6/6
There is an edge of guilt to giving the first six out of six tasting note to a dry, high acid riesling. Yes, sommeliers love this, and yes, almost all rieslings—when made well—are really good. I realize that I am wine taster at risk of becoming a parody of myself. But I am willing to take that risk, because if I can be completely honest with you, this wine is perfect. Not only for the region, not only for the grape, not only for the price point. It’s just perfect. What does it mean for a wine to be perfect? Is it that it’s transportative? Does it have to change your perspective on wine? Or is it that it’s just really fucking good?
Let’s consider the question through the lens of this 2008 riesling from Josmeyer: the nose, after 16 years, is still bracingly intense with baskets of fruit and then demurred with stony minerality. The palate does what I think all great wines do and it evokes the idea of something else, beyond wine. As I was drinking this, I really remembered that first time I took a bit into a lemon tart at a good patissier and the loving assault of aromas and flavors on the senses. The acid, the body, and the flavor intensity are all top notch. And each of the elements are in perfect harmony with each other to create a total experience, not merely a few good components. This wine is perfect. But it’s also perfect because beyond these distinctive, flawless characteristics there’s nothing I would change about it. I don’t wish that the vintage was a little riper, or that there was a little more stone character, or that the fruit took more of a backseat. It won’t be better in a few years. Everything is there, right now, ready to drink, and be experienced at its peak. This wine rules.
And reader, if you’re still with me, I solemnly swear that this tasting note journal will not become a chronicle of me giving perfect scores to perfect rieslings. I will taste weirder, more interesting things, some of which will also be delicious and flawless. But when a wine is perfect, it’s perfect, who cares if it’s a cliche.
We drank this yesterday after Julie and I had the day to ourselves. My mother-in-law was a hero and watched our son for a few hours while we had lunch and took badstue (sauna). We shared the sauna with an English family, two Swiss women, and a German. I went to badstue promising myself that I wouldn’t jump in the water because I’m getting over a cold and I didn’t want to clog my ears/sinuses for weeks.
After 30 minutes in an 85c sauna, judgement goes out the window, and what you told yourself you weren’t going to-do becomes a distant memory. We were explaining how the whole thing works to the English family and I mentioned that you can take the steps onto the roof and jump into the fjord from the roof of the sauna. Of course, the German then peer pressured me into jumping with him and, of course, I relented. We counted 1-2-3 on an elevated wooden plank on the top of the floating sauna and jumped, plunging ourselves 3 meters deep into a frigid Oslo fjord. It’s now 9:30AM the next day and I can’t hear out of one ear and the salt water of the fjord jangles around in my ear when I blow my nose. Whoops.
Swimming for me is a lot like eating popcorn. You start going in on a box and it’s buttery and delicious, but then you get a kernel stuck in your tooth and you wonder if the juice was worth the squeeze, and then the next time it’s on offer you trick yourself into getting excited again, forgetting the small passive annoyance that potentially lies on the other side. Over the years I’ve begun to avoid these passive annoyances, like a tattoo in Memento saying “don’t trust popcorn”. It’s just not worth it. But sometimes it is. The passive annoyance is high, but it always feels a little bit good when you do one of these small, stupid things anyway—because you can. Our lives are too short and too fragile to not take the opportunity to be stupid every once in a while because there’s a German peer pressuring you. And let’s be honest you kind of wanted to anyway. Ignore the tattoo.
This is all a long way of saying that no, I don’t regret jumping into the fjord, but I do feel a little bit dumb for doing so. And that is EXACTLY how it feels giving a riesling the first perfect tasting note score.
P.S. there was no German peer pressure involved in giving this Riesling a perfect score. It’s from Alsace anyway. Relevantly, did you know that Englishmen call German Shepherds “Alsatians” because Alsace—where the breed is from—became part of France after the war and the Brits wanted to avoid “anti-German” sentiment for the breed? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that was not successful. Amusingly, this question is not in the top results for “why do english people call _______________” on google, those are as follows:
