Overripe pear and musk melon allied to distilled pit fruit esters and citrus oils in the nose of Bott’s 2008 Pinot Gris Sonnenglanz make for one of the more wildly colorful and nose hair-raising aromatic displays of its vintage. A Riesling-like stream of fresh citrus juice meets nut paste, decadent melon, and honey-glazed, overripe pit fruits on an expansive yet bright palate, leading to a finish in which smoke and spice overlay citrus and pit fruits and this wine’s high residual sugar is reduced to merely slightly-sweet status. Here is one of several Bott-Geyl wines of its vintage to sock away in the cellar for a few years before revisiting ? assuming, that is, that you enjoy a bit of a risk. “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