Domaine Bott-Geyl Riesling Schoenenbourg, Alsace Grand Cru, France

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Site-typically fusil notes in the nose of Bott-Geyl’s 2009 Riesling Schoenenbourg mingle with lime and tangerine that lend a brightness and vivacity to the palate wholly atypical of the vintage. Salt, iodine, and shrimp shell reduction, allied to zesty citrus piquancy, make for an invigorating and mouthwatering finish. This is relatively lean – even given flatteringly high glycerin – and not conspicuously ripely-fruited for a 2009, but in its energetic, treble way, it is generous (or, at the very least, brash) by the standards of youthful Schoenenbourg. It should be worth following for ten or a dozen years. (Picked even before his basic Riesling in order to head-off one of the rare outbreaks of botrytis he experienced in this vintage, a Bott 2009 Riesling Mandelberg seems to have suffered on both counts.) “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