Follow this for at least ten or a dozen years. Bott’s 2008 Riesling Schoenenbourg offers smoky, fusil notes along with sage raw hazelnut and walnut for an intensely pungent, piquant nose such as one has come to expect from young Schoenenbourg Riesling, especially in a high-acid, cool vintage. That piquancy and pungency runs all the way through a matrix of tart but invigoratingly and refreshingly juicy white peach, lime, and gooseberry, to the gripping, near tooth-jarring finish. Peach kernel and chalk add further complexity but do nothing to alleviate the tendency toward austerity. This impressive Riesling deserves at least 4-5 years of bottle age and ought to drink well for at least a dozen. Whether it will merit yet longer-term cellaring will depend on how much one values whatever more user-friendly traits emerge during its first decade. “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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