Weingut Clemens-Busch vom Roten Schiefer Riesling Qba Trocken, Mosel, Germany

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Bottled the day I tasted it – and thus perhaps suffering some bottle shock – Busch’s legally halbtrocken 2009 Riesling Vom Roten Schiefer is every bit as pungent as its grey slate counterpart, here with the crushed stone element even more obvious, allied to lavender, peppermint, whiffs of yeastiness, and to tangerine and orange with the prominent bittersweetness of their rinds. Palpably dense, oily in texture, and expansive on the palate, this powerhouse finishes with implacable grip; a faintly sweet-sour tension; and ultimately just a bit less fascination than its fraternal “grey slate” twin. Still, this ought to be worth following for at least half a dozen years. “It was no lovely autumn,” notes Clemens Busch candidly. “We had to pick our botrytis wines very early. We had regular rain from the end of October on, and one really had to take great advantage of the dry days to finish.” Busch reports that while his lower-tier lots largely fermented unproblematically to dryness, his riper single-vineyard bottlings were sluggish, several ending up in the legally halbtrocken territory that I have personally tended to prefer at this address, not least because of the tendency for the trocken lots to betray elevated alcohol. Busch – for more about whose methods, style, and vineyards consult the estate introductions as well as the tasting notes in others of my recent Mosel reports – is unwilling to employ cultured yeasts or otherwise intervene to achieve legal dryness. In view of an unfounded and frankly uninformed phobia many Riesling lovers have when it comes to the very idea, it should be pointed out that most of Busch’s dry-tasting Rieslings have since 2001 undergone malo-lactic transformation. That did not however happen with his 2008s (whose high pH levels precluded it) and only selectively with these 2009s. Furthermore, in Busch’s cellar, this transformation – normally not profound, as his ripe fruit is typically not high in malic acid – generally takes place as an interruption during – rather than subsequent to – the alcoholic fermentation. This peculiarity, he contends, explains the absence of diacetyl or other problematic potential byproducts. Even the lighter cuvees here were not bottled until the three weeks leading up to my mid-September visit, and among those wines then being prepped for bottling were a Felsterrasse and Raffes too shaken-up from filtration for me to judge. That the nobly sweet wines here are as notable for their high quality as their abundance I suppose doesn’t need repeating, provided you survey my ratings.Mosel Wine Merchant Trier, Germany (various importers); tel. (413) 429-6176; +49 (0) 651 14551 38; also imported by Ewald Moseler Selections, Portland OR tel. 888 274 4312