Why You Should Pair Your Next Dinner With Riesling

Since we opened The Storm Cellar seven years ago, we have hosted dozens of dinners here at our winery, and there has never been a dinner where at least one course wasn’t paired with Riesling. In fact, for many of the dinners, it’s difficult to not want to pair different Rieslings with every course. Riesling is such an incredible and versatile food-pairing wine, and dishes just seem to shine when served alongside it.

But what makes Riesling so suitable in a food-pairing moment? Isn’t it just a sweet wine, after all?

1. Riesling’s acidity is its hallmark food-pairing quality.

While many people think that Riesling is inherently sweet, as a grape, that is not the case. What we like to say is that Riesling has tendencies or characteristics that allow it to make a great sweet wine, the most notable of which is its naturally occurring high acidity. In a food-pairing situation, acidity refreshes and cleanses the palate between bites. Think about a richer dish like Fettuccine Alfredo. Without a crisp wine or even a glass of lemon-water as a companion, a dish like this can quickly seem overwhelming, but the “back-and-forth” with acidity keeps the experience fresh.

2. Riesling can be made in a broad spectrum of wine styles.

That same acidity mentioned above is a key reason why Riesling can be made in a wide range of styles. You’ve all tried a sweet wine that doesn’t have any natural acidity. It’s almost like drinking a jammy syrup. Why is this the case? For most grapes, once they develop enough sugars to produce a sweeter-style wine, they lose their natural acidity. This is not the case with Riesling, which is why even the sweeter versions of Riesling have an elegance and finesse that is lacking in many sweet wines.

Riesling’s acidity also allows winemakers to produce this grape in dry, off-dry, or even sparkling styles, and its rich fruit-profile of stone fruit, citrus, and flowers seems to translate well into every style of wine. Many wineries will make multiple passes through their Riesling vineyards, enabling winemakers the ability to produce a different style of wine from each of the subsequent harvests.

“The Storm Cellar is crushing the Colorado Riesling game.”

Clara Klein, Sommelier at Sunday Vinyl, “The Best Colorado Wineries to Visit Right Now” in the February 2023 issue of Wine Enthusiast

3. Riesling is a “boundary crosser” for hard-to-pair foods.

We live in a different culinary world than we did even 50 years ago, and the range of worldly cuisines available to us both in grocery stores and at restaurants has broadened and increased dramatically. Our multicultural world has brought us beyond the basic meat-and-potatoes and has introduced us to a vast array of spices, ingredients, and cooking techniques. The diversity on our plates has lead to a diversity of wine-pairing possibilities.

Take a spicy Thai noodle bowl, for example. If you pair a bold, tannic red in this situation, the spiciness of the dish is magnified, and the wine’s vegetal, herbaceous notes are amplified. Both the food and the wine’s delicious qualities are diminished. Instead, if you pair an off-dry (slightly sweet) style of Riesling with that spicy Thai dish, you’ll experience a “soulmate pairing.” The sweetness of the wine not only tones down the heat, but it also brings balance. It’s almost like the heat and the sweetness cancel each other out, allowing the wine’s fruity notes to shine and encouraging subsequent bites and sips. This same thought process can be applied to other cuisines, such as Indian and Mexican, which are oftentimes heavy on spices and spiciness.

And then there’s dry Riesling.

As former sommeliers, we place dry Riesling right at the top, alongside brut sparkling wine, as the ultimate food-pairing wine. What other wine could you serve with oysters and shellfish, fried chicken and potato chips, or a ribeye with béarnaise sauce? When you’re doubting what to bring to a dinner party and haven’t been given clear direction on what’s being served, a dry Riesling is a solid go-to choice.

4. Riesling is refreshing, crisp, and complex.

It seems strange to us that many people – and even publications – focus on white wines as a summer or warm-weather drinking option. While it’s true that a bold, tannic Cabernet Sauvignon is the wrong choice for a 95ºF day in the middle of July, a crisp, chilled-down glass of white wine seems appropriate all year long to us.

A lot of white wines fit the description of being refreshing, crisp, and sessionable. Take a young and effervescent Vinho Verde, for example. While it shares some qualities with Riesling, it oftentimes lacks the depth and complexity that Riesling offers. Riesling translates the nuances within each vintage and region, like very few other grapes can do, resulting in diverse styles that may vary from year to year. In a very general sense, wine lovers enjoy Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon because of their predictability, while they enjoy Riesling or Pinot Noir for their diversity.

The examples we listed above are classic, tried-and-true pairings, but don’t be scared when pairing food with Riesling. The odds are high that the pairing will work. Take our winery and tasting room, for example. For the last three years, during the summer season, we’ve hosted a Friday Steak Night, and it was one of the signature draws of our wine region, even though we only make and serve white and rosé wines. The next time you serve a richly marbled ribeye, opt for a dry Riesling and notice how the wine’s bright acidity “cuts” through the fat, just like the tannins in a red wine would.

Stock your cellar with these current-release Rieslings.

We choose to focus our winemaking on white and rosé wines, but the hyper-focus within that realm is Riesling. Not only do we devote a large portion of our acreage to Riesling, but we also manage an old-vine Riesling vineyard in the town of Whitewater and work with various Riesling vineyards across the Western Slope of Colorado. We’ve even sourced Riesling from Washington’s Columbia Valley, when there were minimal Colorado grapes available in 2021, due to a severe frost event here the prior year.

Over the years, we have made multiple styles of Riesling, and if you have any of our older bottles in your collection, count yourself lucky, as they’re only getting better. If you’re interested in the Rieslings in our current portfolio, here are our options, which you can easily find in our shop.

• 2020 Estate Dry Riesling – 95 points and Double Gold, American Fine Wine Invitational
• 2021 Washington Dry Riesling – 93 points and Double Gold, American Fine Wine Invitational
• 2021 Washington Off-Dry Riesling – 93 points and Double Gold, American Fine Wine Invitational
• 2022 Box Bar Dry Riesling – currently the first and only Colorado by-the-glass wine at The Little Nell’s Element 47 restaurant, winner of the “Grand Award” by Wine Spectator and “Best Hotel Restaurant in the World” by The World of Fine Wine.
• 2022 Cloudburst Sparkling Dry Riesling (club-only) – Gold, Colorado Governor’s Cup

We are excited to say that we have quadrupled our sparkling Riesling production this year and have a new vintage of dry Riesling that we’ll release later in the upcoming months that will blow your mind. It’s done that to ours, at least! Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest updates on wine availability and release dates.

Cheers!!

Jayme and Steve

Special thanks to Olive & West Photography for the vineyard photos, to Sky Taylor-Lahood for the wine-dinner photos, and to Teya Cranson for the Dry Riesling photo.