Pear distillate, litchi, lily, and gardenia headily-scent the Bott-Geyl 2008 Gewurztraminer Sonnenglanz Vendange Tardive, followed up by billowing inner-mouth floral perfume underlain by pear nectar and nougat. An admirable vintage-typical sense of freshness; buoyancy (at a mere 12% alcohol); and mouth-watering salinity combine to render this one of those 2008s of uncanny elegance, notwithstanding the sheer extravagance of fruit and flower and the more than 120 grams of residual sugar that are present. I would expect this to merit attention for 20 or more years. “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