The 2008 Bacharacher Wolfshohle Riesling Grosses Gewachs features toasty, nutty, smoky black tea, and faintly bitter citrus rind and cyanic, fruit pit notes, all playing against juicy fresh purple plum fruit. It preserves a remarkable sense of clarity to stone and iodine mineral as well as to almost Chablis-like meat stock suggestions. Here we have richness and palpable extract along with pure, juicy fruit; glossy richness along with levity and interplay. As this year’s St. Jost Grosses Gewachs demonstrated (negatively) vis-a-vis its Spatlese trocken counterpart, too often wines in this luxury VDP category, while impressive, can’t dance. This is an exception, and it would be well worth planning to partner with it periodically over the next dozen years. There are, by the way, only a couple of thousand bottles of each of this year’s Ratzenberger Grosse Gewachse, which is a typical production level for that genre at this estate. When you taste a collection like this year’s from the two Jochen Ratzenbergers, you have to wonder why their wines’ consistent quality; track record for aging; and frequently stellar performances do not make this one of the most talked-about estates in Germany. (Maybe I shouldn’t wish that on us!) In fact, they are quite well-respected at home, but I think there is a certain snobbishness that rebounds against even the best Mittelrhein Riesling because this region’s precious half-timbered villages and crenellated slopes spell “tourist country” to most German wine lovers.Importer: Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608-9644