Weingut Ratzenberger Bacharacher Wolfshohle Riesling Spatlese, Mittelrhein, Germany

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Site-typically smoky overtones to ripe pear and persimmon fruit carry onto the rather prickly, spiny palate of Ratzenberger’s 2010 Bacharacher Wolfshohle Riesling Spatlese, another of this vintage’s wines whose tension is presently sweet-sour, if undeniably invigorating. That said, I have the impression that a sense of juicy succulence is trying to more generously emerge, and in the department of minerals, heaven knows the sense of crushed stone suffusion and peat on exhibit here is formidably persistent. Give this another year to sort itself out, and I don’t doubt that in one stylistic way or another, this will remain vigorous for 15 or more. 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