2016 Dhroner Hofberg Eiswein

“I’ve always had bad luck trying for Eiswein,” related Adam. One year, boar ate the whole crop; another time wind caught the plastic film like sails and the fruit fell. This year, I said ‘no film, no netting, nothing’ and it either works or it doesn’t.” On November 30, it did. Viscous and glycerol-rich, pure-fruited in its evocation of pineapple, peach and candied lemon, this elixir displays rapier, practically shiver-inducing acidity, but the sort that animates and not – as is too often the case with Eiswein – the sort that sets your teeth on edge. The sense of pure, ultra-concentrated fruits with discreet counterpoint of pit and seed piquancy is remarkable, even if there isn’t multileveled complexity. Perhaps that will come with a bit of bottle age, and precisely because of its purity – and knowing how Adam achieved it – I’m less concerned about this straying from the straight and narrow than I am about most Eiswein. Certainly this elixir’s high residual sugar is already well-matched by its efficacious acidity, and its penetrating, featherweight finish is irresistibly luscious. “In their unfrozen state, these berries can’t have weighed more than 70 or 75 Oechsle,” noted Adam, thus pointing to a significant feature of classic Eiswein and source of the present wine’s spine-tingling performance: The frozen grapes here yielded a must of 145 Oechsle, and it’s that leap in sugar that signals the sort of overall concentration capable of delivering something extraordinary. Increasingly nowadays, must weights are so high across the board that grapes left hanging for Eiswein are already potential Auslesen with a ratio of sugar to water that leaves them far less potential for further concentration, no matter how far below freezing the temperature plummets.