Weingut Ratzenberger Bacharacher Riesling Kabinett Trocken, Mittelrhein, Germany

點(diǎn)擊次數(shù)：3632

Brightly, tartly appley and lemony, the Ratzenberger 2010 Bacharacher Riesling Kabinett trocken exhibits a welcome sense of buffering stuffing (at 11.5% alcohol) and impressive sheer persistence. But it’s pretty austere stuff ( certainly not up to the standards usually set by this cuvee) and I would tentatively plan to serve it over the next couple of years. That said I’ve tasted more than one impressive 15- to 20-year-old dry Ratzenberger Kabinett from a lean vintage, and perhaps I’ve forgotten what such a thing tastes like in its raw youth. (A feinherb generic Kabinett was marginally less well-knit or ripe.) I tasted from 2010 the smallest Ratzenberger line-up I could recall, due to the facts that fewer wines were bottled; the Norwegians had purchased a Wolfshohle Auslese without remainder; and the vintage’s two Grosse Gewachse were still fermenting at the time of my September visit. (I did taste the cloudy, leesy, still-embryonic St. Jost and found it formidably dense, pithy, and citric.) “We hadn’t de-acidified in more than twenty years,” claims the younger Jochen Ratzenberger, “but anybody who says they didn’t this year is lying.” He calls it “a hard autumn” with picking and pressing so onerous and time-consuming that “we were in the cellar until two and three every morning and in the end there was little to show for it. I don’t want to go through anything like it again soon.” The total volume was but half of a normal crop, with quantities at the Q.b.A. and Kabinett levels confined to what was felt to be the commercially requisite minimum. Fermentations were sluggish - sometimes kicking into malo -and for that reason even the lighter wines weren’t bottled until July. “You couldn’t do anything by rote, but had to keep tasting every lot as it evolved and each was different from the next,” adds Ratzenberger, who reports that in the best instances malic and tartaric acid levels were about equal by the time of picking.Imported by Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608-9644