The local varieties are certainly not Alsatian, but with a bit of careful shopping, Ukrainian vintners pose a close second.
imes do it, there’s cognitive dissonance involved in shelling out, say, the equivalent of $45 for a French bottle to accompany a meal that costs the equivalent of four. On the other hand, sometimes you want to avoid sugary Eastern European and Caucasian wines and drink what, as a Westerner, you’re used to: wines like cabernet sauvignon, merlot, red zinfandel (the real zin, not that sweet pink crap Americans drink), syrah, the pinots and the sauvignons.
And, of course, riesling. I love the stuff: It’s my favorite white wine. I like its high acidity; like the way it’s floral without necessarily being sweet, to the point where occasionally it even tastes like a rarefied variety of soda pop; like the slope-shouldered bottles that, like other Alsatian wines, it comes in; and like that it’s so low in alcohol that I can drink a whole bottle of the stuff without slurring my words.
Furshet sells some Alsatian wines, and I’ve been drinking a lot of one of them in particular: the Dopff & Irion riesling, which sells for a little over Hr 109. It’s good. It has a high acid level and a nice pale-tannish color, and it kind of softens and sweetens up in the glass, so that whereas it starts off pleasantly sulfurous-tasting, it ends up flowery and soft. I recommend it.
On the other hand, there’s that cognitive dissonance again. For Hr 109, you can ride to Lviv and back, and have enough left over for a couple beers from the provodnik. So I made a point of finding local substitutes for the imported riesling.
I found two. First, there’s Inkerman’s Alkadar Riesling (about Hr 12 – now we’re talking), which is a strange little product. It tastes nothing like Riesling – has none of the flowery fizz. Rather, it’s a standard dry white wine in the sauvignon blanc register. If you like such wines, you’ll like it; if you’re looking for riesling, you’ll be confused.
Better is the so-called “half-dry” white from Magarach (about Hr 15), in Crimea. It’s a blend of riesling, sauvignon white and aligote – not that you’d know it without reading the fine print on the back of the bottle.
The color’s unusual: dark and tawny, reminding me of sherry. Whatever: It comes close to approximating riesling, and for a ridiculously low price. Will it fool you into thinking that it’s Alsation? No, no, no. But it’ll do.
Now for some enterprising local enophile to come up with credible dirt-cheap substitutes for Yquem, Petrus and Mouton-Rothschild.
