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Red Wine

Thornbury 2008 Waipara Riesling

As regular readers will know, I am particularly partial to Riesling. I like it for the versatility, variety of flavours and styles that this wine can exhibit. Unfortunately for a while Riesling got bad press as anyone with an inferior white, sweet wine would call it a Riesling, which it wasn’t necessarily. Thankfully now, people now know what Rieslings are and we are seeing more quality Rieslings available, including product from New Zealand.

Thornbury has identified Waipara as one of the best regions in this country for growing Riesling, in it’s choice of Waipara as the source for its fruit. Waipara, in North Canterbury offers ideal growing conditions for this type of grape. Close to the sea and sheltered by the Main Divide in the west, Waipara offers the combination of warm days and cool nights that this fruit likes. These conditions in general will produce a Riesling that has intense flavours, great aromatics and good natural acidity.

Thornbury picked their fruit at optimum ripeness, then cool fermented in tank to retain the fruit’s delicate varietal characteristics and floral notes. The wine was then briefly aged on yeast lees to enhance texture and complexity before being fined, filtered and bottled.

The resulting Thornbury 2008 Riesling has floral aromatic notes of lime and peach. On the palate I found this off-dry style Riesling to be crisp and fresh with flavours of mango, nectarine and citrus. It has a slightly grainy texture with a lingering, clean but slightly hard finish. I would expect the wine to mellow and improve with careful cellaring until 2012. I would recommend trying it with a Thai green or red curry, especially when pork is chosen as the meat.

Reviewed by Stephen Clark (26/6/2009)

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