Eva Fricke Lorchhauser Seligmacher Riesling

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Frickes 2009 Lorchhauser Seligmacher Riesling is dry-tasting but not quite legally trocken. At 13% alcohol, it is full and lush, but – in a fashion Fricke thinks is typical for this especially quartzite-rich site – displays mouthwatering salinity and primary juiciness, along with a surprising sense of levity and elegance. Bitter notes of fruit pit and herbs are deftly-integrated and this clings with impressive stubbornness and sense of mineral residue. I expect it will be worth following for at least half a dozen years. Ensconced in the cellars of the ancient Kotherhof (and former Weingut Geschwister Bibo) at the upper edge of Kiedrich, Eva Fricke – who continues as operations manager at Josef Leitz, and for more about whose own estate consult my account in issue 187 – has turned out her fourth collection from old vines in Lorchs steep, quartzite-laced slate slopes, which she says were not afflicted by the drought stress that some other growers in nearby sectors reported. While she harvested most of her holdings in the Seligmacher around mid-October, most of her Krone and Schlossberg vines were not picked until the last of that month and the first days of November, demonstrating that precipitant sugar-accumulation did not become a problem for her as it did for some growers just upstream in Rudesheim. The results are on the whole impressively complex, though with the slight down-side that low level botrytis or related fungal influence appears to have precluded the utmost clarity of which Riesling from these sites is capable. Fricke reports having had difficulty getting her wines approved for Pradikat by the local Weinkontrolle without agreeing to de-classify them to Kabinett, a situation I can only interpret as reflecting the Oechsle and residual sugar inflation nowadays so typical of Germans Riesling realm, as a result of which she has elected to henceforth dispense with Pradikat other than in rare instances of high residual sugar. Incidentally, once one gets past the generic and “village level” Rieslings trocken, production here drops to only a few hundred bottles per wine.Importer: Farm Wine Imports, Sausalito, CA; tel. (415) 331-4906