{"title":"Kanta","description":"\u003cp\u003eIf you've met the urbane, serious man that is Egon Müller (Egon Müller IV, that is), you may be surprised to learn that he heads Down Under every year to make Riesling in Australia. Like Crocodile Dundee, except in reverse and with a German accent.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDundee, of course, used his outdoorsy outback skills to solve new problems he ran into on the mean streets of 1980s New York. Well, Egon also has skills—Saar skills—and it didn't take him long to figure out how to adapt them to the Adelaide Hills.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEgon hates group-think, which he worries Australian wine judging encourages. You see, in Oz there's a tiered system, where the upper ranks are selected from among the lower ranks. In Egon's opinion, this inevitably results in group-think, as the surest way to win promotion is to think and judge the same way as those ranked above you.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis group thinks, per Egon, that Australian Riesling should be picked early and fermented dry. Egon agrees that Australian Riesling should be dry, which you might find surprising since he's a staunch resistor of the trend towards drier wines at home in Germany. But with the thicker skins of Australia's Riesling, he believed that it was better to pick the grapes later than the locals do, to allow the grapes to develop full phenolic maturity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePlanning later picking, Egon sought as cool a site as possible so that alcohols wouldn't get out of control. So in 2010 he and his partner, Michael Andrewartha, moved to a higher-altitude site where they are able to produce fully balanced, dry Rieslings that clock in at a very drinkable, lower ABV, which they call \"Kanta.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[],"url":"https:\/\/sf.flatiron-wines.com\/collections\/kanta.oembed","provider":"Flatiron SF","version":"1.0","type":"link"}