Pear, Persian melon, and freesia rise from the glass of Richter’s 2007 Veldenzer Eliseneberg Riesling Spatlese. Flatteringly creamy and delicate, this displays great purity of fruit and seductive sweetness of inner mouth floral perfume. It finishes with subtle stoniness, nut oil richness, and terrific, lip-smacking refreshment, a combination hard to beat under any circumstances and a sensational value that can happily be cellared for 12-15 years. “I always harvest here last of all my sites, otherwise nothing comes of it, because of the side valley in which it’s located” says Richter of the Elisenberg. “I like to call it the Ruwer of the Mosel.” Dirk Richter is an historian of the Mosel as well as one of the region’s foremost growers, and he claims that on five occasions in the eleven years between and including the epochal vintages of 1911 and 1921, flowering on the Mosel took place in May ... but then not again until 2007. He started picking already in early October, but only as a means of thinning (“pre-harvesting”) his Brauneberg vineyards, and the resultant Kabinett is rather green in flavor. Harvest did not begin in earnest here until mid-October, and save for the two T.B.A.s that he painstakingly collected, Richter insists there was scarcely any botrytis. Interesting, the yields from Richter’s Wehlener Sonnenuhr vineyards – his only remaining ungrafted vines – were the highest this year that he has ever experienced, and the wines are by no means disappointing (although Auslese was not possible). The grip exhibited by his dry-tasting wines may in part come from the skin contact Richter gives most of them, in part to buffer their acids. Still, as he puts it, “with the intense minerality, strong acidity, and very low pH of Mosel Riesling, some residual sugar is needed. And here, with feinherb-as-trocken, that need is borne out quite clearly, and the wine tastes dry, and people drink it as ‘dry’.” What’s more, lower alcohol helps these “dry” Riesling dance. If feinherb (often as high here as 25 grams in residual sugar) works on Richter’s German customers, halleluiah! For anybody else, these feinherb Kabinetts should be no-brainers, especially at his prices. Richer shares my enthusiasm for the undeservedly obscure and misunderstood Pinot Blanc (a.k.a. Wiesser Burgunder), and is in process of doubling his acreage and planning to produce some Sekt from it as wellImporter: Langdon-Shiverick Cleveland,?OH; tel. (216) 861-6800
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