Riesling

Riesling is the white grape of the Rhine and the Moselle. DNA markers show Gouais Blanc as one of its parents; the other is unknown (VIVC). French writers once disputed whether it was the Sauvignon under another name. Auguste Petit-Lafitte, the Bordeaux agronomist, reported in La vigne dans le Bordelais (1868) that Bosc placed the Riesling in the Sauvignon family and that the comte Odart did not approve that view; Cazalis-Allut had already called the idea an error in 1865. Petit-Lafitte also noted that the wine of Johannisberg is made with the Riesling.

There are 2 Bordeaux plantings on record. Édouard Féret, in his 1908 book on the red and white wines of the Graves, describes the cru Pontac-Riesling, created by Emile Lalanne on his estate at Villenave-d’Ornon and planted only with riesling “imported directly from the great crus of the Rhine and the Moselle”; the 1922 edition of the guide of Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret repeats it. In Sauternes, Féret wrote in 1908, and the guide repeated in 1922, that château Guiraud was planted all in sauvignon or sémillon, apart from a few plots in “metternich”, the name given to the riessling that makes the famous wines of Johannisberg.

The name had a wider use. From 1898 the guide gave the grapes of the Sauternes country as two fifths sémillon, two fifths sauvignon, and one fifth “le metternich et la muscadelle”. Féret’s own equation makes the metternich Riesling; VIVC does not list the name among Riesling’s synonyms, so the identity is likely. Riesling’s line reached Bordeaux again in 2023: VIVC records markers showing that Souvignier Gris is a cross of Seyval Blanc and Zähringer, itself a cross of Gewürztraminer and Riesling, and the arrêté of August 16, 2023 admitted Souvignier Gris among the white grapes of Bordeaux and Bordeaux Supérieur.

Oldest record in my library: “le riesling blanc”, 1816, in André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus (the Rhine); in the Gironde, as “metternich”, Cocks and Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins, 7th edition, 1898 (Sauternes country), and by name, Édouard Féret, Les vins des Graves rouges et blancs, 1908 (Pontac-Riesling)