I had a lot of fun at yesterday’s Great Riesling tasting in London. There were so many good wines. But of all, perhaps my favourite (of many lovely wines) was a Kiwi Riesling from Framingham. And, the irony is, that because this is 6.5% alcohol, the EU won’t allow it to be imported, which is nuts. But the good news: everything Framingham do with Riesling is interesting, and lots of their wines are imported into the UK by Les Caves de Pyrene. Try the F-Series Riesling Auslese and the Noble Selection Riesling, for example – they are brilliant too.
Framingham F-Series Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese 2013 Marlborough, New Zealand
6.5% alcohol. Picked mid May in three tranches; 320 g/l residual sugar. Powerful, rich, unctuous and viscous. Rich melon, honey and apricot characters with some ripe pear. Amazing concentration and intensity. A remarkable wine that’s impossibly sweet but balanced. 96/100
UK agent Les Caves de Pyrene
Find this wine with wine-searcher.com
Have you got that right “because this is 6.5% alcohol, the EU won’t allow it to be imported”? After all, they do allow 5.5% Moscato from Australia; it just has to be labelled “made from partially fermented grape juice” rather than wine. Maybe Framingham need to be a little more flexible with the labeling then it would get in?
I have bought 4 or 5 bottles of each of the 2013, 2014, and 2015 from a UK merchant.
D’Arcy