2010 Winninger Rottgen TBA

Knebel's 2010 Winninger Rottgen Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese - representing around 50 liters - was only bottled last May. Imagine a key lime meringue pie glazed with honey and pear preserves, at once luxuriantly creamy, lusciously fruity, and quickeningly citric. Scents of candied lime peel, vanilla, peppermint, crystallized ginger and peppermint all ultimately have their counterparts on the palate and complexly interactive and electrically-penetrating finish of this viscous yet feather-light elixir. Salted caramel serves alongside fresh lime juice for salivary gland-milking savor. Like many nobly sweet wines of its vintage, this could easily be mistaken for Eiswein and a certain tension between its ennobled aspects and turbo-charged acidity is unsurprising, perhaps even unavoidable. And like other such essays, only time can really tell whether this will go on to an even more glorious future, or perhaps veer off in a strident or inharmonious direction as often happens to Eiswein. But it's certainly exciting to taste today, and if you are willing to embrace uncertainty, you'll find it exciting to hold a bottle or two far into the future. The Knebels commenced their 2011 harvest on September 26, but picked most of their top vineyards in mid-October. Conditions were so warm that cold water was run through hoses as an improvised way to cool the newly-arrived musts. They report very little botrytis, as their mini-quantity of nobly sweet wine confirms. Matthias Knebel says that when it came to selecting those lots destined for single-vineyard bottling, he and his mother were especially rigorous this year, since 2010 had left them with such a huge short-fall in entry-level wine that they desperately needed to declassify enough lots to make up for this in 2011. As has frequently been the case in recent years - including 2010, where this is the only corner of Riesling Germany I know to have experienced higher aggregate must weights than in 2011 -Winnigen's incredibly steep old terraces arguable gave too much of what were traditionally deemed unmitigated virtues: grape sugar and degradation of acid. Thankfully, most of the Knebel 2011s avoid any outright alcoholic heat let alone harshness, but they are largely big-bodied, and even so were frequently bottled with levels of residual sugar substantially above the legal limit for designating as "trocken." Henceforth, non-Pradikat wines here are presumed dry or discreetly off-dry in taste but will not carry the "trocken" imprimatur even if warranted, a move in which the Knebels follow their neighbor Lowenstein as well as a few of their Saar colleagues, and which appears to have succeeded in those instances, German wine lovers- nearly ubiquitous insistence on "drinking dry" notwithstanding. The line-up here - whether or not for the better or indefinitely - has been radically streamlined to feature among non-Pradikat wines just a single bottling from most of the estate's principal vineyard sites. There have also been recent changes in surface area, due to the heartbreaking - not to mention foolish - ripping-out by its owner of several parcels the Knebels had long leased, and the heartening acquisition beginning 2013 of another small slice of Sternberg (within today's Bruckchen). Imported by Louis/Dressner Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 334 8191