Weingut Prager Smaragd Riesling, Wachau, Austria

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The Prager 2010 Riesling Smaragd Klaus is more overtly extract-rich; more stonily mineral; yet at the same time more forwardly fruity than its Achleiten counterpart. Sappy apple, white peach, and golden raspberry inform a plush, polished, palpably dense yet paradoxically buoyant palate underlain by wet stone and tinged with saliva-inducing salinity. Here is yet another instance of a 2010 that’s analytically totally dry yet displays an alluring sense of fruit sweetness that’s no doubt enhanced by the wine’s sheer extract. This memorably long Riesling ought to be worth following for at least a decade. “True, we had higher than normal acid levels,” relates Toni Bodenstein, “but I did things differently than in other years; three things, namely. The first was to let the grapes hang especially long, and all of the Smaragd was harvested in November. Then, I employed up to 17 hours of skin contact, which reduced the acidity by a gram, sometimes even more. Of course, that was tartaric acid, but due to the long hang time and healthy fruit, we had a high ratio of tartaric. And after long fermentations – not ended before February – we added no sulfur whatsoever and retained the fine lees, which we then stirred weekly through April, making for even higher extract levels and more buffering. And given the high extract and low pH levels, these wines needed comparatively little sulfur at bottling, which with the exception of one early portion of Federspiel, took place in May. To have de-acidified them,” he concludes emphatically, “would have been to risk stripping them of their souls.” Given the tiny size of his crop, Bodenstein elected to forgo separate bottlings from two sites each in Riesling and Gruner Veltliner, instead supplementing his two Federspiel bottlings with that fruit (even if their vineyard designations on the labels stayed the same) “and even then,” he notes, “with Weitenberg and Liebenberg added into the Hinter der Burg, for example, I ended up with less than 50% of the volume of that Federspiel in 2009.”Importer: Winebow, Montvale, NJ; tel. (201) 445-0620

On the soft side, with some residual sugar, this is initially a gentle Riesling. Slowly it reveals its minerality, which pushes into the juicy peach and apricot flavors and brings its own salt and flint texture. It is so elegant yet so powerful. ——R.V.(10/1/2010)—— 94