2009 Bockenauer Felseneck Beerenauslese

Maracuja, white peach preserves, and glazed pineapple; green tea and wormwood; salted caramel and white raisin, mingle intriguingly and seductively on the nose and palate of a Schafer-Frohlich 2009 Schlossbockelheimer Felsenberg Riesling Beerenauslese. With an enhanced sense of creaminess and weightlessness to the corresponding gold capsule Auslese, as well as a comparable juicy freshness that is even more remarkable in the context of a wine rendered entirely from shriveled berries, this indescribably luscious B.A. manages to refresh as well as seductively sooth, finishing with cloud-like, enveloping persistence that promises to leave you in a rapturous daze. “When it ran from the press this looked like a pale Spatlese,” notes Frohlich, and the resultant wine is correspondingly pale and vivacious. Nut oils, browned butter, salted caramel, and lobster shell reduction add irresistibly mouth-watering savor to this near-miracle of a botrytis Riesling and tribute to the amazing talents of the Felsenberg as well as those of its champion, Tim Frohlich. Do what you can to acquire a few bottles and drink one for each of the next three decades. Tim Frohlich (for some of whose comments on the 2009 vintage consult my general introduction to this report) continues his streak of ever more intensive vineyard work on ever-greater acreage, rendering a persistently expansive range of phenomenally high-quality bottlings that covers a stylistic breadth few German wineries are interested in, much less can equal. “Once I began smelling the musts of these 2009s” says Frohlich, “I knew that this was what I always wanted to achieve.” Reliance on ambient yeasts has become the norm here and – like late harvest (this year not commencing until the second half of October) – something that Frohlich passionately advocates. This year, Frohlich left-behind more solid matter in the tanks to feed the fermentations – which, for the dry wines, extended into February – and ended up with correspondingly generous lees on which, as usual, the young wines rested after fermenting (although he still bottled the top dry wines by late June). This approach to fermentation and elevage made particular sense, opines Frohlich, due to the quality of this year’s fruit. He showed me a photograph of transparent, utterly blemish-free but already freckled golden-green Riesling berries that delivers a profound lesson ? once he explains that it was taken six weeks before the first bunch was cut for the 2009 Gutsriesling! “The truth is,” contends Frohlich, “with grapes this perfect, cultured yeasts are liable to give you wines that are dominated by sheer peachy, straightforward fruit at the expense of differentiation, complexity, and authenticity.” On the other hand, he thought it best to tread very cautiously this year when it came to pre-fermentative skin contact. There’s certainly no need to worry on any of those counts given how things turned out, and the dry wines in the present collection don’t reflect even the moderate levels of alcohol that they in fact possess (in the top wines, around 13%). Many are the Grosse Gewachse rendered in very small quantities, about which growers are sometimes reluctant to impart the actual production numbers. Tim Frohlich will proudly tell you that nearly half of his huge vine acreage in Felseneck made his qualitative cut for Grosses Gewachs, and the totality of his four 2009 Grosse Gewachse represents 25,000 bottles. At the botrytis end of the spectrum, despite the paucity of shriveled grapes, Frohlich relates that “I had six people employed exclusively for picking out whatever raisins they could find,” and the result is a dazzling range of nobly sweet elixirs. Imported by Rudi Wiest, Cellars International, Carlsbad, CA; tel. 800 596 9463