Bott-Geyl Riesling Schlossberg, Alsace Grand Cru, France

點(diǎn)擊次數(shù)：2561

Bott’s 2009 Riesling Schlossberg features a play of piquant lime peel and huckleberry against a bright, subtly tart amalgam of white peach and crab apple. A nearly sizzling sense of tactile, crystalline, peppery mineral impingement lends invigoration to a firm, bright expression of its site such as I would not have anticipated from this vintage. Bott explains that his parcel – for more about which see my review of his inaugural, 2008 bottling – ripens early, but retains moisture, whereas vines in some portions of the Schlossberg suffered late-summer 2009 stress. As tight as this is, I suspect it will benefit from several years of bottle age and should hold up well for at least a 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