2010 Wolfer Goldgrube Auslese Goldkapsel

From a selection favoring well-desiccated berries from old vines, the Vollenweider 2010 Wolfer Goldgrube Riesling Auslese gold capsule exhibits a fungal side to its botrytis, along with aggressive scents and bite of radish with lemon and grapefruit rind, impressions familiar from the many Eiswein-like nobly sweet wines of its vintage and of this collection in particular. The sharply-penetrating 16.5 (!) grams of acid here virtually cancel out 221 (!) grams of residual sugar, so that from material on the cusp of T.B.A. in must weight and beyond “normal” Eiswein in acidity, a Riesling results that one by default must call an “Auslese.” For all of its severity, this sappily intense exercise in extremity finishes not just with prodigious persistence but also genuinely exhilarating refreshment. Still, nobody can say what it will become over time, though it will certainly last for three or four decades. In 2010, Daniel Vollenweider’s suffered roughly a two-thirds crop loss vis-a-vis his normal expectations. Picking of this depleted vintage began already on October 8 and was finished at month’s end. “It wasn’t a year of great phenolic ripeness,” he reports candidly, “and picking decisions were incredibly difficult.” Vollenweider extended skin contact and bottled most of his wines later than usual in order to afford his young wines longer time on their lees. Only a single trocken lot was acid-adjusted, and then merely by one gram, with calcium carbonate. “I would have been happy to let at least some lots – in particular for my dry wine – go through malo,” he remarks, “but my pH levels were so low that there was not a chance of that happening.” Levels of residual sugar are significantly higher in this year’s sweet wines than Vollenweider’s already high norm, but as he asserts “they need this, definitively, to balance out such high acids,” and the net effect is by no means a sweeter taste. Reductive and sulfur-related notes are even a bit more frequently evidence here than one already anticipates at this address, and Vollenweider hypothesizes that the wines’ low pHs led to a temporary accentuation of such traits. Importers include Vineyard Research, Inc., Lunenburg, MA; tel. 617 686 8052; Ewald Moseler Selections, Portland OR; tel. 888 274 4312; also A Bill Mayer Age of Riesling Selection Imported by Valley View Wine Sales, Glen Ellen, CA; tel. (510) 549 2444