Incorporating a significant share of this vintage’s Sonnenglanz crop the Bott-Geyl 2008 Gewurztraminer Les Elements smells of smoked meat, brown spices, over-ripe melons, and musk oil. In the mouth, a seemingly incongruous yet pleasingly intriguing matrix of rich veal stock and juicy melon are laced with bacon and herbs, and surprisingly enlivened by citrus. The feel, too, is unusual for Gewurztraminer in its firmness; and the hints of fruit pit rather Riesling-like. The long finish is downright refreshing, evincing only slight sweetness, far less than the grams per liter of sugar would have led you to expect. This ought to be worth employing over at least the next 6-8 years. “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