Weingut Emrich-Schonleber Monzinger Halenberg Riesling Qba Trocken, Nahe, Germany

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The Schonlebers’ 2008 Monzinger Halenberg Riesling trocken (corresponding to the former Halenberg Spatlese trocken) offers an uncanny combination of palpable extract with levity and vivacity. Peach, peach kernel, mirabelle distillate, almond, cherry, and smoky black tea on the nose lead to a silken-textured yet insistently juicy palate suffused with crushed stone and underlain by lovely suggestions of nut oils and saline, crustacean savor. This finishes with mounting intensity that offers a sort of reversal of the Fruhlingsplatzchen’s exit. Fruit from a recently acquired parcel and the first crop of tiny golden berries – partly shriveled – from a recently planted part of the Auf der Lay vineyard informed this gem. I would expect to follow it happily for 8-10 years. As with last year’s rendition, you have to ask yourself how much better the corresponding Grosses Gewachs could possibly be, when this wine is already more interesting as well as elegant than most wines in that VDP luxury category. Werner and Frank Schonleber are another Nahe dream team whose amazing performance in 2007 has been equaled in 2008. “I wouldn’t call it a vintage with the emphasis on fruit,” says Werner Schonleber, “but rather on a pronounced, saline minerality. And there was no great selection of nobly sweet wine this year, because every three or four days it would rain at least a little bit.” He offers as “a very simple explanation” of this pronounced minerality the classic one adduced by growers (whether or not scientifically supportable) that the vines better “assimilate mineral stuff” when mild weather and plenty of moisture grease – as it were – the wheels of plant metabolism. And such vintages always boast measurably high levels of dry extract; the question remains, has that – as most growers believe – anything to do with their expression of flavors for which we feel compelled to employ mineral vocabulary?Importers: Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608-9644; Dee Vine Wines, San Francisco, CA tel. (877) 389-9463