From largely mature, terraced vines along a heat-trapping but well-watered mini-valley near the center of the cru, and adjoining Domaine Albert Mann’s holdings, the inaugural Bott-Geyl 2008 Riesling Schlossberg is prominently and saliva-inducingly salty. Add to this saline savor bright, colorful juiciness of lemon, grapefruit, and tangerine and you have a recipe for something invigorating and refreshing. Aromas of heliotrope and rowan contribute a sense of allure not just in the nose but in billowing inner-mouth profusion. High-toned aromatic and juicy palate evocations of white peach manage to avoid the borderline excessive volatile esters found a few other Bott-Geyl 2008s. In sum, one could scarcely have asked for a better performance from vines that were not under Bott’s direction until this year; and one could also scarcely have asked for a better example of what most experienced observers would call an archetypal granitic Riesling, favoring flowers and the saline side of minerality.
“For me it was not a classic year for V.T. or S.G.N.,” says Jean-Christophe Bott of 2009. “There was very little botrytis, and when we started picking it was with the aim to make the best possible normal range. I found most of the Gewurztraminer very aromatic and fruity, but soft and lacking the depth of their sites; too much on the varietal side, so I preferred to mostly declassify, and also because in 2008 we had a great vintage whose wines really taste of their sites.” My judgment on 2008 is qualified. Detached tartness and decidedly fungal overtones suggest that in some instances fruit had to be harvested lest it succumb to botrytis. A measure of that fungal advance is that the nobly sweet wines in the present collection are enormously high in sugar and quite strongly marked by botrytis, yet represent the product of picking entire blocks rather than bunch-selection.
Various importers, including Beaune Imports, Berkeley, CA; tel. (510) 559 1040 and Winebow, Montvale, NJ; tel. (201) 445-0620
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