First Tasting - Trimbach Riesling

Before getting into the details of our first wine tasting, I want to talk a little about the tasting environment. Maybe after you have more experience you can form your opinion of a wine in any setting, but when you are novice like myself I think the ideal situation is to have an environment where you can really concentrate on the wine.

So what was our environment for the first tasking? 

• 5PM
• my wife was trying to finish cooking diner
• I was trying to entertain our 2 and half year old son

Ideal? Probably not, but we had some ambitious drinking plans for that night. It was New Year's eve and we were planning on tasting the 2007 Trimbach Riesling and then drinking a bottle a champagne. We opened the bottle, tried to taste and think about the wine while everything else was going on. Bottom line - it did not work. We decided to just drink a glass or so with dinner and then revisit the wine again after our son went to bed.

Now that it was quite in the house we sat down together at the kitchen table to taste the Trimbach Riesling again. This Riesling was from the Alsace region of France. As described, but not expected, this Riesling was not sweet like the German Rieslings I have tasted in the paste. It was actually rather dry. The thing that stood out to me the most about this wine was the acid. When I first sipped it I really felt the acid on the side of my tongue and cheeks. Overall, on a scale of 1 to 5 I gave the wine 3 and my wife gave it a 2 and a half.

We were a little behind schedule but we did manage to have some champagne as well.  We did not finish either bottle but I think we made a respectable effort and most important, by the time the ball dropped at midnight, I was feeling pretty happy.