The Rumpf 2006 Scheurebe Spatlese – combining fruit from Dautenpflanzer and Kapellenberg – smells of peppermint and cassis candies; fills the mouth with creamy and bonbon-like, sweet, exuberant pink grapefruit, honeydew, mint, sage, and black currant; and finishes lusciously, if very sweetly. The grapes had turned lavender, says Johannes Rumpf, and had to be picked. This tastes it. To those many Pfalzer who insist on making a sort of sweet aperitif out of Scheurebe: if you must do it, here is a place where it makes much more sense, where a certain cool herbal and citrus cast and stony, saline minerality keep it from going over-the-top. It should be relished over the next 6-8 years. Here’s another Rumpf wine unbelievingly carrying the same suggested retail as its 2004 counterpart. Stefan Rumpf’s collections may still – as I wrote of it previously – be “sprawling ... at times hit and miss.” But his aim becomes ever more accurate. (Son Johannes is now intimately involved.) This year, the Rumpfs decided to take advantage of their enhanced acreage of a variety that they would probably have given up on ten years ago had it not been for their importer, and bottle a dry Scheurebe. The timing was perfect, because not only did this estate make some of the only noteworthy Scheurebe of the vintage, but in the Pfalz – even when growers are not challenged as they were in 2006 – Scheurebe is more and more getting marginalized as a “supplemental variety,” destined solely for some of that region’s rare wine of residual sweetness.Importer: Terry Theise Estate Selections, imported by Michael Skurnik Wines, Inc., Syosset, NY; tel. (516) 677-9300