StateWays is the only magazine exclusively covering the control state system within the beverage alcohol industry, with annual updates from liquor control commissions and alcohol control boards and yearly fiscal reporting from control jurisdictions
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The days of double-digit growth may be over at least temporarily, but there are some other positive signs. While the growth has mainly been driven by the work of Riesling-loving sommeliers in the on-premise, retailers have been doing their share. More Interest at Retail here is more activity in the off-premise all the time," says Bruce Schneider of Wine of Germany. "Clearly it's a specialized category, but in the last seven years we've gone from being a very niche thing that sommeliers drank after work, to now, while it's not mass mainstream, but the awareness and appreciation of German Riesling is so much broader than it was seven years ago." "T Jamie Koren, European wine buyer for the Wine House in West Los Angeles, says sales have remained stable since the surge a few years ago, which coincid- ed with the greater presence of Austrian wine in the U.S. – while most Austrian whites are Gruner Veltliner, there are many Austrian Rieslings in the market as well. (While generally synonymous with its largest pro- ducer, Germany, Riesling is a significant factor not only in Washington State, where it just edged out Chateau Ste Michelle features an extensive lineup of eight different Rieslings, including its top-selling Columbia Valley Riesling and its Eroica Riesling in part- nership with German legend Ernst Loosen. Chardonnay in 2010 as leading varietal, but also in Alsace, Australia and Austria.) But Koren notes that on-premise atten- tion and the tough economy has made it harder to sell as much of the higher end wines off-premise. "A high energy sommeli- er can move wine faster than we can when we put it on the shelf at 70 bucks – that kind of wine is really hard to sell these days. On the other hand I've done very well on the value priced, $15 to $20 range," he says. Thiese notes that while Riesling can attain a very high T he International Riesling Foundation, an international consortium of wine producers linked by their varietal choice, has in its brief life already had an impact in the U.S. after only a few years in existence. Known recently for its support of the modest annual promotion, "Summer of Riesling," more important according to IRF president Jim Tresize is the label model the organization developed. "The IRF Riesling taste profile has really boomed," says Tresize, who's also the head of the New York Wine Grape Foundation. "We know of more than 26 million bottles of Riesling that are in the U.S. market this year that bear the label, and probably within a year or two, all the Riesling producers in the U.S. market, whether U.S. producers or not, will have it as well." Evolving a uniform and simple guide that producers could agree upon wasn't easy – Tresize credits the work of long-time Beverage Dynamics contributing writer Dan Berger for his work over six months writing the guide- lines and mediating conference calls with the many interested parties. But now that consumers are becoming accustomed to finding the label guide, it's seen as a boon to sellers who seek to demystify traditional German terms used to express sweetness. Producers select the arrow placement ("We're not going to be the wine police," Tresize says), using technical guidelines for those categories - Dry, Medium Dry, Medium Sweet and Sweet. The design can be used on labels, merchandising materials, web sites and elsewhere, with the goal to establish "a common, simple, consumer- friendly system for identifying Riesling tastes," according to the IRF website. StateWays s www.stateways.com s March/April 2012 39