2018 Riesling It’s Been Friday For A While
Rheingau, Germany
Welcome to our 30th label anniversary!!!
(Yeahhhhhh…haha)
It’s amazing to think we’ve done 30 labels of Kitten Swish! Our first release being the 2011 Zinfandel “Daniel” seems like a hot minute ago. I can clearly see the day it arrived and held it in my hands for the first time. Through the years we’ve bottled wines from Dry Creek Valley, Alexander Valley, Rioja, Eger, Languedoc, Rheingau and the Okanagan Valley. Six Countries in total. Our drive to find the best juice for your mouth is as bright as ever, and our 30th release being Riesling is as fit a bottling as I could hope for this special anniversary.
We hope you love it.
Our partner for this special release is the venerable Balthasar Ress from the small hamlet of Hattenheim. Their vineyards are prime middle Rheingau with long gentle southwesterly exposures and deep loess and marl soils. Historically we’ve bottled this wine from the Schützenhaus vineyard just west of the village as I’ve always liked the plump profile of the kabinett here. However, the 2018s are rather large and full-fruited and can carry a little more chub around the middle than other recent vintages. This pleasant and precocious girth is a delight for today’s drinking, however, the kabinetts can feel a little more like Spätlese. Since our goal with this wine is to have a certain litheness, crucial for versatility, we opted in 2018 for the more slender declassified kabinett from a combination of different vineyards, including some grapes from Schützenhaus. The resulting wine matched our goal of procuring a nibble that can be cracked and cranked at any given moment of the day; on either side of 8am.
The label this year is a miss-matched and mangled shake-up of the Kitten Swish logo. I’ve always liked words in design and felt for the 30th label anniversary we should straight-up celebrate Kitten Swish. I moved the two words around, jostling and poking, looking for a visual that would entice and lure and capture our certain devil-may-care style.
The name, “It’s Been Friday For A While”, aptly entitled for our current times (who could have guessed?), was actually named in the fall of 2019. The name stems from particular guests who frequent restaurants night after night, merrily washing back bottle after bottle of wine and countless glasses of cocktails. We would see these guests from Thursday all the way to Sunday. After the third or fourth consecutive night we would make the comment, “Wow, it’s been Friday for a while over there.” Some people love to have fun, all the time; and sometimes it does indeed feel like it’s been Friday for a while.
Somehow it started on
Thursday, and now
It’s like Tuesday
For allocation requests or a list of available retailers please contact us.