2011 Rudesheimer Berg Schlossberg Riesling

At 12.5% the highest in alcohol of this year’s Breuer cru-bottlings (whereas it was the lightest of them in 2009), their 2011 Rudesheimer Beg Schlossberg Riesling delivers aromas of nose-wrinkling but pleasant pungency suggesting gunpowder green as well as smoky black tea, accompanied by lime peel and peach kernel, all of whose counterparts on a generous palate offer welcome counterpoint to the wine’s underlying lushness of texture, and complement a delightful sensation of shimmering interchange with stony, crystalline and saline mineral nuances. Peach, fresh lime and almond form the core of a sappy matrix that persists through a vigorously sustained finish, well-supported by about eight grams of residual sugar, which is the level at which all of this year’s Breuer crus stopped fermenting. “We were shocked when we got the analyses,” notes Teresa Breuer, “to discover that the sugars were that high.” I’d say it’s clear on the basis of taste that these wines knew what was good for them! Plan to follow this one through at least 2022. The Breuer family has bottled a host of formidable collections over the decades, but I must say that Theresa Breuer and her team have very lately been on a roll. When I visited her in the third week of September, 2011, the Riesling harvest was already in full swing even as it rained intermittently. Thankfully, that rain soon stopped definitively, and in the end the Breuer Riesling harvest was not entirely finished until almost a month later. Relatively early picking, though, has typified this estate ever since I began visiting it in the mid-1980s, and young Theresa Breuer was quite confident that her viticulture regimen in 2011 would guarantee longtime cellarmaster Hermann Schmoranz fruit of more than sufficient ripeness and health, a confidence that the results in bottle more than bear out. “Yes we picked earlier, but,” she points out, “the entire season was early. Then it cooled off; we didn’t have to select nearly as laboriously as we had anticipated, and the wines have kept a certain freshness precisely because we started earlier.” That’s hardly the half of it: these wines’ remarkable levity by contemporary dry German Riesling standards – not to mention the standards of recent Rudesheimer Berg wines or the vintage – is coupled with ravishing complexity and vintage-typical sheer generosity. And that last trait is not one I usually associate with youthful Breuer crus. Virtually all of the 2011fruit was pressed directly to enhance clarity and vivacity; only that from Rauenthal plus a very few Rudesheim lots having received brief pre-fermentative skin contact. Imported by Classical Wines, Seattle, WA; tel. (206) 547-0255