Harvested near the beginning of October – nearly two weeks before his two single-vineyard Pinot Blancs – Gies’s 2009 Weisser Burgunder trocken Calcit is scented with apple blossom and brightly juicy with apple and lemon tinged by salt, stone, and apple pip. In short, this lip-smacker could almost pass for a Mosel Riesling, and I never would have guessed it harbored 13% alcohol. I would plan on enjoying it over the next couple of years. Volker Gies – for more about whose vineyards and methods consult my coverage in issue 185 –continues to display impressive talent and is happily receiving increasing recognition inside Germany. Hopefully wider U.S. distribution of this estate’s wines will follow. Like other of the best 2009 vintage Rieslings from Gies’s corner of the southern Pfalz, his harbor highly efficacious acidity and high energy of a sort that can by no means be taken for granted – not even on the Mosel! – in this vintage (and indeed, is almost entirely absent in the Rieslings from further south in Alsace). I have been quite keen on Gies’s Pinot Blancs, but found them (as well as his Pinot Gris) – despite ample ripeness – marginally disappointing from 2009, a circumstance familiar from this vintage in neighboring Alsace.Importer: Tartaglione Fine Wines, San Francisco, CA; tel. (415) 216-3356