2005 Graacher Himmelreich Auslese

Very reduced nose and rather simple lemon sherbet palate. No great layers of flavour here. Rather thin and skinny. It may have reached the required Oechsle levels but doesn’t seem to have much interest. Fades very fast on the finish. (JR)

The 2005 Graacher Himmelreich Riesling Auslese smells of flambeed peach, lemon meringue, and black currant preserves. On the cusp of B.A. in must weight and honied richness, it preserves the liveliness and lightness of touch and sheer drinkability conveyed by fresh grapes. Seductive inner-mouth perfume of flowers and spices overlie a tropically opulent, subtly botrytized pool of fruit that remains transparent to mineral nuances. Insistent citricity keeps the flavors lively through to a finish of refinement and lift. For all of its youthful sweetness, this has undeniable immediate appeal, yet one can be confident of at least three decades satisfying development in the bottle. “We made what I think was the right decision to harvest relatively early,” says Manfred Prum, before botrytis became the most prominent element in the wines’ character as in his opinion had been the case in 1976. Still, the Prums were blessed this year with terrific quality but cursed with a dearth of material that could legitimately be bottled even as Spatlese let alone Kabinett. (Note: There is usually more than one bottling and therefore more than one eventual A.P. number chez Prum for any given Kabinett or non-auction Spatlese and even some Auslesen. The differences in character, they promise, are kept to a minimum, and indeed in many cases it is a matter of the same base wine temporarily stored in more than one tank. For that reason, I was as usual not privy to the A.P. numbers of the un-bottled, non-auction wines that I tasted.) Various importers including P. J. Valckenberg International, Tulsa, OK; tel. (918) 622-0424 and Rudi Wiest, Cellars International, Carlsbad, CA; tel. (800) 596-9463