2010 Riesling Schoelhammer

Full bottle 1,273 g. Bottle 1,174 out of 2,034 bottles produced. Jean-Frédéric Hugel says, ‘There are things you learn and in viticulture you learn every day. 35 years ago, Marc started micro-vinifications and realised each block has personality – each vineyard, each of the 220 blocks of the winery has a name (which drives the new arrivals at the winery nuts). Depending on that name, you realise year after year it becomes handy because year after year you get to know the names, and you get to know the plots that make the wines. This wine is always more or less the same three plots. Not a matter of quality but a matter of balance. But in this vineyard there is the depth, the concentration, the mouthfeel, that tells you how it is going to age. 2010 was a very very warm vintage – warm days, warm summer, dry July/August.’ Jekyll meets Hyde, island tropical fruit meets northern European green apples. This wine is schizophrenically mango/greengage, gold-juice-flesh/cold-winter-rain, stone-linear/honey-curve, hard/silk. It should surely not be 11 years old, but if pressed to put an age on this I would stand back and stop and say: I have absolutely no idea. It’s ageless. It’s moved itself into a seamless crack of non-time, gathering caramel and spice-toast, pears poached in amontillado, smoky chestnuts in walnut liqueur. It’s ancient-dust-motes old and yesterday’s rye bread toasted with honey. It’s the sun-warm stone steps you sat on as a child, that this morning, years later, smell of cold moss and rain. (TC)