Marzipan, quince jelly, butterscotch, litchi, and honey dominate the Bott-Geyl 2008 Gewurztraminer Schloesselreben Selection de Grains Nobles along with its nearly 170 grams of residual sugar, for an impression almost excessively confectionary for my palate. Thank heavens that even here there is at least a deeply-buried rivulet of primary juiciness such as characterizes the vintage, and a smoky, faintly bitter note of black tea offers some push-back against its sweetness. But this wine’s acidity is no higher than that of the “regular” grand cru bottlings in the present collection, and I suspect that is simply too little for its sugar. I don’t doubt that this will keep for at least 12-15 years, but I strongly suspect that it will still be overly sweet at that point.
“For me it was not a classic year for V.T. or S.G.N.,” says Jean-Christophe Bott of 2009. “There was very little botrytis, and when we started picking it was with the aim to make the best possible normal range. I found most of the Gewurztraminer very aromatic and fruity, but soft and lacking the depth of their sites; too much on the varietal side, so I preferred to mostly declassify, and also because in 2008 we had a great vintage whose wines really taste of their sites.” My judgment on 2008 is qualified. Detached tartness and decidedly fungal overtones suggest that in some instances fruit had to be harvested lest it succumb to botrytis. A measure of that fungal advance is that the nobly sweet wines in the present collection are enormously high in sugar and quite strongly marked by botrytis, yet represent the product of picking entire blocks rather than bunch-selection.
Various importers, including Beaune Imports, Berkeley, CA; tel. (510) 559 1040 and Winebow, Montvale, NJ; tel. (201) 445-0620
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