Albert Boxler Pinot Gris Brand, Alsace Grand Cru, France

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The dry (!) 2016 Pinot Gris Grand Cru Brand is clear and piquant on the flinty nose that is dominated by ripe white fruit aromas. Intense and powerful on the palate, this is a rich but elegant and refined Pinot with fine tannins and a long finish with nice bitters. Tasted October 2018.

From 35+-year-old vines, the 2015 Pinot Gris Grand Cru Brand offers a deep, clear, bright and intense bouquet with stony and smoky bacon aromas. The nose is fresh and pure, with even some lemon aromas. The attack on the palate is fresh and piquant but also finessed and elegant. There is a certain sweetness and clearly lush fruit on the palate but also purity with fine tannins intertwined with the dancing grip and salinity. The finish is very long and complex. This is great a Pinot Gris in the dry style.

The 2014 Pinot Gris Grand Cru Brand is very clear and elegant on the nose and again doesn’t show any hints of drosophila due to a very strict selection in the vineyards. Instead there is ripeness, purity and minerality. On the palate this a rich and creamy textured wine with power, concentration, fine tannins and a remarkable finesse. It is a rather medium-dry Pinot that should be aged for ten or more years.

The 2013 Pinot Gris Grand Cru Brand is sourced from a parcel planted in 1960 and another planted in 1990. Very clear, precise and slightly smoky on the nose where ripe pip fruit aromas are displayed, this is a lush, sappy, piquant and mineral Pinot with elegance, a firm and crystalline character, and a good and stimulatingly salty finish. Bottled with 6 grams per liter residual sugar, this is a virtually dry and still very young Pinot Gris. Excellent.

Brand as a site, encompassing its ability to convey a saline mineral, effusively floral, and hard to pin-down sense of elegance to each noble cepage it touches, then this is the year and estate to do so, as vividly demonstrated by Boxler’s 2008 Pinot Gris Brand. Honeysuckle, heliotrope, and rowan mingle in the nose with pear, white peach, and mango that then succulently saturate a buoyant, creamy palate, while billowing floral perfume and saline savor in the finish leave you sucking air and salivating in anticipation of the next sip. This tastes like the heaven to which countless residually sweet Alsace Pinot Gris aspire before falling to earth. Try not to miss a chance to follow some of it for the next 15 years. Jean Boxler relates that in 2009 he picked some parcels of young wines early due to stress, then sold off the juice; and any under 15 years’ age he didn’t even bother to pick. Eventually, when he harvested his older vines and best sites, the sugar levels were the same – but not the flavors. He deftly charted a course with most of the resulting wines between alcohol and residual sugar, but to the extent it was unavoidable, sinned on the side of sweetness. From 2008, almost predictably given the track record at this address, Boxler rendered sharply focused, minerally complex, yet seductively fruit-filled wines that should prove excellent both as keepers and as partners with cuisine. Boxler compares these wines with his 2002s and finds then “definitely more interesting than the 2001s.” While most of the 2008s finished fermenting already by Christmas – which is par for the course chez Boxler – he points out that several of the extraordinary wines from the Brand lingered into spring. (For some detail on among other things Boxler’s different Riesling parcels, see my report in issue 188.)Importer: Robert Chadderdon Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 757-8185