Is it harder to make great white wine than it is to make great red wine? Well, it’s certainly easier to pluck a cheap bottle of red off the shelf and for it to be, at the very least, drinkable. When scouring the options for whites, however, we’re in much shakier territory: there’s less room to hide for the winemaker, where skins and stems play no part in the process (unless we’re in so-called orange wine territory, where maceration with skins is involved in the same way as with red vinification), and the quality of the grapes becomes even more important. There’s less gubbins to hide poor grape juice.
That’s why, when I’m trawling the shelves of independents and supermarkets alike, I’m drawn hypnotically to one region I know is likely to outperform most on the price/quality quotient: Germany. (It’s also one of the reasons we’ve crammed the shelves at our John Dory wine shop in Kent with lots of riesling.)
