2009 Winninger Rottgen TBA #12/12

The Knebel's 2009 Winninger Rottgen Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese A.P. #12/12 requires a double numerical designation, because this represents a viscous elixir that kept me company in a corner of the Knebel's tasting room on two of my annual visits and was only bottled last May, along with the corresponding 2010 T.B.A. An Esszencia-like concentrate of apricot preserves and salted caramel whisked with butter and lemon juice, this defies gravity in its combination of viscosity and levity, while somehow managing in lemon meringue fashion to be both ultra-creamy and bracingly bright. A sea breeze-like overtone to the apricot preserves and distillate in the nose has its savory, saliva-inducing mineral counterpart all the way through to the wine's phenomenally long finish, representing a mineral nuance such as one seldom encounters in youth from a wine with this sort of stratospheric must weight and implosive intensity. I realize that the micro-quantities in which the Knebels have scored some of their most remarkable nobly sweet successes have been known to lead other growers to cast aspersions on their accomplishments, as though anybody could make something this amazing provided there were just a few liters of it. Well, there are 50 in this instance, which I daresay means enough half-bottles that this wine won't be forever forgotten by all but a tiny handful of people. And it won't be auctioned, the Knebels assured me, but instead be sold a bottle or two at a time to some of their most loyal and eager clients. As to the view very frequently expressed by outstanding Riesling growers that it is too risky to let a T.B.A. must sit idle - perhaps burping-up a bubble of CO2 every hour or so - for months and months, 27 of them did this wine no harm! I suspect it will come close to seeing out the 21st Century, and, what's more, that its genuine glory years and point of greatest complexity are as yet far, far off. (An earlier lot of 2009 Rottgen T.B.A. - reviewed in issue #192 - was bottled as 2010's A.P. #19 having reached the legally requisite 6% alcohol two years ahead of its twin.) The Knebels commenced their 2011 harvest on September 26, but picked most of their top vineyards in mid-October. Conditions were so warm that cold water was run through hoses as an improvised way to cool the newly-arrived musts. They report very little botrytis, as their mini-quantity of nobly sweet wine confirms. Matthias Knebel says that when it came to selecting those lots destined for single-vineyard bottling, he and his mother were especially rigorous this year, since 2010 had left them with such a huge short-fall in entry-level wine that they desperately needed to declassify enough lots to make up for this in 2011. As has frequently been the case in recent years - including 2010, where this is the only corner of Riesling Germany I know to have experienced higher aggregate must weights than in 2011 -Winnigen's incredibly steep old terraces arguable gave too much of what were traditionally deemed unmitigated virtues: grape sugar and degradation of acid. Thankfully, most of the Knebel 2011s avoid any outright alcoholic heat let alone harshness, but they are largely big-bodied, and even so were frequently bottled with levels of residual sugar substantially above the legal limit for designating as "trocken." Henceforth, non-Pradikat wines here are presumed dry or discreetly off-dry in taste but will not carry the "trocken" imprimatur even if warranted, a move in which the Knebels follow their neighbor Lowenstein as well as a few of their Saar colleagues, and which appears to have succeeded in those instances, German wine lovers- nearly ubiquitous insistence on "drinking dry" notwithstanding. The line-up here - whether or not for the better or indefinitely - has been radically streamlined to feature among non-Pradikat wines just a single bottling from most of the estate's principal vineyard sites. There have also been recent changes in surface area, due to the heartbreaking - not to mention foolish - ripping-out by its owner of several parcels the Knebels had long leased, and the heartening acquisition beginning 2013 of another small slice of Sternberg (within today's Bruckchen). Imported by Louis/Dressner Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 334 8191