2009 Eitelsbacher Karthauserhofberg Beerenauslese 43

Candied lemon rind, mint candy, quince jelly, and faintly spoiled mango and kiwi scent the 2009 Eitelsbacher Karthauserhofberg Riesling Beerenauslese Nr. 43, which was picked out over numerous parcels and days (and which incidentally, while given a "fuder number" as a sort of nickname, is in fasct the sole B.A. here this year). Lusciously but superficially sweet, its residual sugar doesn't appear to experience much push-back at the hands of acidity. It finishes with a breadth and generosity consistent with its entire, effusive performance, but there is for me a sense of having overstepped the bounds of noble rot just slightly, into the realm of faint funkiness and spoilage. If you are planning to cellar some, I would critically revisit a bottle within the next 5-7 years in an attempt to make an informed guess as to its longer-term future. Had it not been for the intervention of rain October 27, says Tyrell, he would have harvested considerably more wine of this sort. From the material that informed this B.A., he picked-out a Trockenbeerenauslese, but that wine had sold out completely, leaving me unable to taste it. Christoph Tyrell's and his young cellarmaster Christian Vogt harvested almost throughout the second half of October, with the exception of what was left for a December Eiswein harvest under prolonged frigid conditions that Tyrell described as "unbelievably easy and leisurely … and the best in the history of our estate," an assessment from which there will unsurprisingly be some dissent, starting with that registered in my tasting note! While Tyrell emphasized to me the extent of the October 27 rain on the Ruwer, he reported having brought in 95% of his fruit before then. He has dropped a few wines and tweaked his line-up, more in terms of nomenclature than in any substantive way, in order to more closely conform to the generic-village-cru "pyramid" and attendant conventions envisioned as a classificatory model by the VDP (even though every wine here comes from the family's "great growth" monopole Eitelsbacher Karthauserhofberg). The old Pradikat terms and wine names familiar from the estate will continue to appear on the "official" – otherwise known as "back" – labels, while the new nicknames (or the symbol used by the VDP to designate so-called Erste Lagen or Grosse Gewachse) appear on the colorful neck labels, which as most devotees of German Riesling know, were for most of its twentieth century history the sole labels used by this estate. (Christoph Tyrell's grandfather designed them so that he could cool bottles in the stream that rushes past the estate on its brief journey to join the Ruwer without the labels washing away and turning every party – of which he apparently staged many – into a blind tasting.) Importer: Rudi Wiest, Cellars International, Carlsbad, CA 800 596 9463