Combining custard-like richness and sheer viscosity with refined and enlivening acids, the St. Urbans-Hof 2009 Ockfener Bockstein Riesling Eiswein A.P. #21 – harvested December 23 – delivers the scents and flavors of Rainier cherries drenched in orange liqueur and laced with candied lime peel and crystallized ginger. A sweaty, musky, saline overtone reminds one of the funkiness that so often comes with this genre, but here it simply adds intrigue and allure (though perhaps some will find its implications too kinky). At a mere 6.5% alcohol this is a whole percentage “l(fā)ighter” than the corresponding T.B.A. Like a gleaming saber sheathed in quince jelly and near-gelatinous yet lightweight essence of Bockstein Riesling berries just as one imagines their having fallen frigidly from the press, this finishes with both caress and cut. It isn’t just reluctant to let go of you, this Riesling haunts you. If there’s an Eiswein to pack away for treating yourself twenty Halloweens from now, it’s probably this one, but this genre is inherently tricky, so plan on revisiting somewhere between 5 and 10 years out. Unfortunately, there are only 100 liters.Nik Weis thinks 2009 – in which his team harvested well into November – really demonstrated the cumulative effects from a decade of intensively “in gardener’s fashion” hoeing the soil, composting, pruning short, returning wire-trained vines to single posts, and in general farming so as to put the brakes on sugar accumulation in the grapes and permit ripening to greater incipient complexity as well as delicacy. This entails inter alia backing-off from too aggressive a green harvest when it comes to the very best sites, and leaving a few more bunches to hang for longer. “Anytime you’re in a position to harvest a Trockenbeerenauslese from the Ockfener Bockstein, and you feel compelled to place the Piesporter Goldtropfchen before the corresponding Ockfener Bockstein in the tasting sequence, that’s a great vintage,” says Weis, echoing a traditional sentiment that Saar Rieslings are a touchstone of top quality throughout the greater Mosel region. Indeed, this collection offers the very apotheosis of Bockstein, and if you don’t think this site (or at least, the finest parts of it) is truly great – I didn’t myself until I encountered old wines at this address 15 years ago – get ready to have a conversion experience! Incidentally, Weis has bought up the rest of the original Zickelgarten within Bockstein, so that were he to win permission to re-activate that site name (retained in the 1971 Wine Law but last utilized by Kesselstatt in 1983 and later abrogated after no subsequent owners chose to declare it) he would have a really top-class monopole. For the second year running at this address – and despite the fact that fermentations were relatively fleet – there is only a single legally trocken bottling, namely the inaugural Grosses Gewachs – not coincidentally a loner as well for having been fermented with cultured yeasts in order to insure that its finished residual sugar qualified for the club in question.Importer: H. B. Wine Merchants, New York, NY; tel. (917)-402-0456
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