Accumulated from several small lots, and constituting, exceptionally, the sole Egon Muller wine of its vintage and Pradikat, his 2010 Scharzhofberger Riesling Kabinett delivers zesty, refreshing lemon and lime underlain by wet stone and suffused with mouthwatering salinity. The high extract is palpable as stuffing, and the sense of sweetness very restrained. It is more formidable than winsome, and definitely in keeping with Muller’s insistence that regardless of legal definitions or of how others conceive that term, when he puts “Kabinett” on a label he’s thinking “Cabinet” in the solely approbative pre-1971 sense of a prime exemplar of its grape and site not marked by botrytis or pronounced sweetness. This ought to perform well for at least a decade and is likely to become more interesting.
Egon Muller scored a collection of striking successes in 2010, albeit at the price of tiny yields, comparable, he notes, to those of hail- and botrytis-ravaged 2006. This paucity of juice, combined with high ripeness, is reflected in the, for this estate, very surprising presence of only one Scharzhofberger each of Pradikat Kabinett and Spatlese, consisting of an amalgamation of several tiny lots. Nor need collectors fret about the identity of A.P. #s ... save when it comes to Trockenbeerenauslese, since a second one of those was fermenting at the time of my visit. (The 2009 vintage T.B.A. reviewed in Issue 192 now carries this year’s A.P. #11 and achieved at auction last September a record price of 5300 Euros for 750 ml.) Picking began October 14, “already with beautiful botrytis,” Muller notes, and was finished before the end of the month to respect the crew’s All Saint’s holiday weekend and because – although he indicates that there was negligible rain here at the beginning of November – Muller perceived scant likely benefit to postponing passes on an already extremely light-bearing vineyard. “We picked out what little botrytis-free fruit there was intermittently through the course of the harvest,” he adds, “and de-acidified musts selectively as seemed warranted, independent of the quality (i.e. Pradikat) level in question.”
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