Weingut Max Ferd. Richter Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spatlese, Mosel, Germany

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Richter’s 2010 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spatlese is generously scented and brimming with juicy apple and yellow plum, the bitter side of the vanilla bean along with pips and pits of the fruits serving for pronounced counterpoint. Heliotrope and honeysuckle seem to flatteringly wreath the performance, and the combination of textural creaminess with brightness is deft, leading to an at once soothingly and brightly lingering finish. I suspect this will achieve one’s “normal” expectations for the longevity of the best of its genre, easily 20 years. While I don’t meant to extrapolate without warrant, it is hard not to consider significant the fact that this especially successful Spatlese is among the very few in the present collection to have fermented entirely spontaneously. “The last time I had acid levels as high as in 2010,” reports Dirk Richter, “was in 1980, and I don’t need to tell you that vintage was a disaster even by then-prevailing standards. What’s more, that was the last time I had de-acidified. Even in challenging years like 1981, patience at harvest and the right upbringing of the young wines – maceration, later bottling, encouraging tartrate precipitation, etc. – sufficed to deal with high acids. In many cases this year, we double-salt de-acidified twice, in must and then again in wine – after having done nothing for thirty years; I couldn’t believe it was happening! But it was the only way to remove a sufficient share of the malic. The finished wines are still plenty high in acidity, but I did not want to repeat my experience from 1990, in which I bottled wines with as much 11 grams acid. The second year, they started to taste sour, and that never left them even as their textures eventually creamed-up. I think that two years from now many de-acidified wines will start fatiguing whereas our best will be coming into their own.” In 2010, needless to say, the grapes were essentially ripe – indeed all met the admittedly weak legal minimum for Auslese – but as Richter notes “I had to keep revisiting parcels again and again taking just what had properly ripened because the condition of bunches was so heterogeneous.” Precautionary levels of sulfur combined with the naturally low pH levels of 2010 material are, he speculates, the reason why he ended up having to yeast most of his musts this year to achieve satisfactory fermentation. Richter reports having managed to pick-out 20 and 30 liters respectively of B.A. and T.B.A. but at such pathetically small levels he felt it made more sense to blend them back selectively into the vintage’s Auslesen. “I’m laying everything on the table,” he noted with his usual candor when we began tasting, “some are quite good, some are meager, but I’ll let you judge for yourself.”Importer: Langdon-Shiverick Cleveland,?OH; tel. (216) 861-6800

A sharp white, whose grapefruit, apple and mineral flavors are cut by the vivid structure. This is a bit pinched in the end. Best from 2012 through 2020. 335 cases made.??–BS??Region: Germany / Mosel-Saar-Ruwer Select to Add

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Apple, honeysuckle, and lily attractively scent the nose of Richter’s 2007 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spatlese. This comes onto the palate almost weightlessly, with liquid floral and subtly honeyed character, flattering creaminess, and a caressing yet refreshing finish. One to taste the high yields in this vineyard, and yet that’s not necessarily a critique, since this wine’s delicacy, easy drink-ability, watercolor like wash of flavors, and almost irresistible charm may even owe something to them. Still, I would be included to drink this over the coming decade (!) and not push my luck. Dirk Richter is an historian of the Mosel as well as one of the region’s foremost growers, and he claims that on five occasions in the eleven years between and including the epochal vintages of 1911 and 1921, flowering on the Mosel took place in May ... but then not again until 2007. He started picking already in early October, but only as a means of thinning (“pre-harvesting”) his Brauneberg vineyards, and the resultant Kabinett is rather green in flavor. Harvest did not begin in earnest here until mid-October, and save for the two T.B.A.s that he painstakingly collected, Richter insists there was scarcely any botrytis. Interesting, the yields from Richter’s Wehlener Sonnenuhr vineyards – his only remaining ungrafted vines – were the highest this year that he has ever experienced, and the wines are by no means disappointing (although Auslese was not possible). The grip exhibited by his dry-tasting wines may in part come from the skin contact Richter gives most of them, in part to buffer their acids. Still, as he puts it, “with the intense minerality, strong acidity, and very low pH of Mosel Riesling, some residual sugar is needed. And here, with feinherb-as-trocken, that need is borne out quite clearly, and the wine tastes dry, and people drink it as ‘dry’.” What’s more, lower alcohol helps these “dry” Riesling dance. If feinherb (often as high here as 25 grams in residual sugar) works on Richter’s German customers, halleluiah! For anybody else, these feinherb Kabinetts should be no-brainers, especially at his prices. Richer shares my enthusiasm for the undeservedly obscure and misunderstood Pinot Blanc (a.k.a. Wiesser Burgunder), and is in process of doubling his acreage and planning to produce some Sekt from it as wellImporter: Langdon-Shiverick Cleveland,?OH; tel. (216) 861-6800