Weingut Ratzenberger Steeger St. Jost Riesling Kabinett Halbtrocken, Mittelrhein, Germany

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Lime, grapefruit, and autumn squash scent and flavor the Ratzenberger 2010 Steeger St. Jost Kabinett halbtrocken, whose hint of residual sugar is more than balanced out by high acidity, but no doubt contributes to the sense of lusciousness conveyed on a bright, light palate. No doubt, too, the wine’s high extract - which in no way contradicts a sense of levity - is conducive to knittedness and harmony. Suggestions of root vegetables add to the complexity of this handsomely lean wine that gets by remarkably well without being especially ripe. Here is a vivid example of 2010 being a throwback to earlier times, and I could imagine myself in the presence of a young wine from such statistically ordinary yet at their best distinctively successful vintages as 1981 or 1986. Considering that this had only been bottled two weeks before I tasted and thus had every reason to be out of sorts, it represents an exceptional performance for its vintage, if not for this particular cuvee, whose history - like this instantiation - is one of excellent value. 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