Vine varieties: Riesling

Riesling in the 1960s, Riesling was, with Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir, one of the Big Four in California. Beginning in the 1970s, its reputation began to decline, as an explosion in differing sweetness levels lacked a coherent set of semantic explanations. There may be a connection. During the 1980s, both sales and acreage tumbled, and scores of wineries abandoned Germany’s noblest grape, leaving it in the hands of a few stubborn supporters. By the mid 2000s, barely 20 wineries produced a varietally labelled Riesling, none of them highly priced, but a flurry of interest in the variety generated from Washington State resulted in a doubling of acreage in California from just over 2,000 acres to more than 4,000 in the ten years from 2004.