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Saint Clair Pioneer Block 9 2008 Big John Riesling

Saint Clair’s Pioneer Block 9 or Big John Block is located in Marlborough’s Lower Brancott Valley. It has a typical mid-Marlborough climate of warm days and cool nights approaching vintage. This generally means that the fruit is gently ripened over a lengthy period.

The vines planted in this block are around ten years old, and this combined with the age of the soil in which they grow contribute to the distinctive mineral notes and excellent fruit weight in the wine. The evenness of the soils in the block and the age of the vines were the reasons why this block was chosen as a pioneer block.

As regular readers of my column will know, there are various different styles of Riesling, and with this particular block, Saint Clair’s winemakers have decided to go with a German Spatlese style. Spatlese literally means late harvest, in other words it is made from fully ripened grapes. In Germany, fruit for wines of this style are picked seven days after the normal harvest, but the Spatlese still sits below Auslese in terms of sweetness and lateness of picking.

Even though the fruit is picked later and most people might expect this would mean that it is a sweeter wine, Spatlese can also be produced in a dry style and this style tends to be favoured by journalists in Germany. Wine made with the Spatlese picking will also generally cellar longer than the normal picking of the grape.

To make Saint Clair’s Big John Riesling, the grapes were pressed upon arrival at the winery, with as little skin contact as possible. The free run juice was fermented separately at cool temperatures with selected yeasts to re4tain fruit flavour and freshness. The ferment was stopped at approximately 50g/l of residual sugar and then balanced prior to bottling. With the Spatlese style and particularly drier Spatlese Rieslings, balancing the wine is very important as it can be very easy to produce an unbalanced wine with high alcohol levels.

Rieslings are aromatic wines and I found the Big John Riesling to contain aromas of apple and citrus, particularly grapefruit, lime and mandarin. I also noticed a slight hint of peach. On the palate I found this wine to have flavours of apples, ripe pink grapefruit, and peach, with slight hints of honeysuckle and honey. I would expect the notes of honey to become more prominent with aging. It is a wine where the residual sugar has been well balanced by the acidity forming a wine that seems off-dry and it has a long lingering finish.

I would recommend trying the 2008 Saint Clair Pioneer Block 9 Big John Riesling with lightly spiced Asian cuisine or seafood. Alt4ernatively this wine would be a good alternative to sparkling wine at parties. It is a very pleasant, easy to drink Riesling that will cellar well for at least a further five years if you can avoid the temptation.

Reviewed by Stephen Clark (27/11/2009)

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