Weingut Carl Loewen Quant Riesling, Mosel, Germany

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Winter squash, nutty fresh spinach and green herbs are key notes in Loewen’s 2010 Riesling Quant, which like last year’s edition weighs in at 11.5% alcohol and a couple of grams in excess of the legal limit for Trockenheit. A waxy, almost silken texture and juicily citric, nutty, subtly saline and piquantly peach kernel-inflected persistence make for an ingratiating if understated performance that ought to prove versatile at table over the next several years. (By contrast, this year’s oily-textured dry Riesling Varidor displayed overtly bitter phenolics and an overall sense of severity, notwithstanding its considerable flavor interest; while alkalinity and piquant fruit pit and toasted grain notes lent considerable austerity to Loewen’s 2010 Riesling trocken Alte Reben, a characteristic underscored by the wine’s 12.5% alcohol.) “Nobody knew what to do” in the fall of 2010, maintains Karl-Josef Loewen, “because nobody had every witnessed anything like such a vintage.” He took all but a few of his musts down by one and a half grams of acid using calcium carbonate, which still left them plenty high. “I suspect that if you analyze my wines this year – just as with many classic Mosel Rieslings of a bygone era – you’ll find that some harbor a bit of lactic acid; but I did nothing to encourage malo and none of my wines experienced any profound malo-lactic transformation. What’s more, given the low acidity we are expecting in 2011, I would not want to be one of those growers who invited malo-lactic bacteria to have the run of my cellar. But this much is certain,” he adds: “if you had green, under-ripe aromas in the must this year, then you were never going to get rid of them by any means.” Loewen tends to welcome botrytis, and I can’t help wondering whether that has proven the Achilles heel for some of his drier 2010s, for which berries are generally crushed (this year at times foot-trodden) and given up to 12 hours of skin contact before pressing, techniques that, he acknowledges, should generally presuppose essentially healthy fruit.Terry Theise Estate Selections, imported by Michael Skurnik Wines, Inc., Syosset, NY; tel. (516) 677-9300