Enough time was available for sorting through this year’s Auslese harvest to render 300 liters of Sankt Urbans-Hof 2006 Piesporter Goldtropfchen Riesling Beerenauslese that accentuates the sweet floral perfume and honeyed richness familiar from that previous wine. Orange rind, lemon zest, pink grapefruit, and brown spices contribute a pungency associated (or at least allied) with botrytis. Really amazing about this wine are its underlying firmness (despite a hint of creaminess), palpable density, and blazing, fresh citrus brightness (despite a hint of caramel). Pure, refreshing, and penetrating, the invigorating finish generates a veritable electrical charge. This still embryonic concentrate should not be disturbed for 12-15 years and should last 40-50. Nik Weis has proven himself a master not only at judging balance in Riesling, but at successfully marketing well-balanced but not legally trocken wine to his countrymen. (Chapeau!) That was a good thing this vintage, he says, because he thinks many of the high must-weight wines he harvested would not have balanced either at significantly higher alcohol or residual sugar. I agree, having found his wines in the lower realms of residual sugar especially successful. The vintage demanded compromises in harvest strategy if not in ultimate quality. “There were wonderful shriveled berries in the Laurentius Lay,” for example, relates Weis, “and had I had another fifteen pickers or another few days, we could have harvested a Trockenbeerenauslese” as happened in 2005, when one of the greatest wines of the vintage resulted. “But I had Kabinett grapes in Piesport at that point that would no longer have been Kabinett if I had waited while the whole crew went picky gepidelt hatten. We had to deal in full parcels this year, not select.” The 2006 wines here were taken from their lees and bottled sooner than in most years.Importer: H. B. Wine Merchants, New York, NY; tel. (917) 402-0456

The 2005 Piesporter Goldtropfchen Riesling Beerenauslese offers a super-concentrate of caramelized apple, toasted pralines, grilled pineapple, quince preserve, and white raisin. Formidably viscous and sticky without being treacly, this suggests a pecan pie topped with fruit preserves and white raisins and baked in a buttery shell. Faintly bitter toasted, nutty notes help to offset the sweetness and the wine draws juicy freshness from somewhere, even though Weis insists the fruit was 100% botrytized. This finishes with superb and multifaceted length, and can be expected to stand up to three or four decades of delicious drinking. The team here – cellarmaster Rudi Hoffmann, vineyard manager Hermann Jostock, and proprietor Nik Weis – continued their streak of highly successful harvests this year, albeit at the price of extremely low yields.Importer: H. B. Wine Merchants, New York, NY; tel. (917) 402-0456