2010 Uhlen Roth Lay GG

Very ripe pear, quince and peach allied to nutty piquancy and ravishingly sweetly-scented floral perfume characterize the finished bottling of Heymann-Lowenstein 2010 Winninger Uhlen Riesling Roth Lay Reserve which boasts an improbable absence of any negative characteristics from its 14.7% alcohol or of overt sweetness from its roughly 30 grams of residual sugar, and an uncanny alliance of textural creaminess and expansiveness with lift and vivacity that are still much as I described them from cask in issue 199. Glowing, resonant, and gripping yet without phenolic or alcoholic roughness, this superb concentrate ought to perform memorably for a dozen or more years, though granted there is always some risk that its alcohol will become evident. “They were a pleasant surprise,” says Reinhard Lowenstein of his 2011 results, adding “I would never have believed heading into harvest that they would have turned out so well. I was afraid there’d be negative botrytis like in 2006, but in fact there was just a small band in Rottgen and Uhlen and higher up everything stayed healthy.” The main portion of his crop was picked near the end of September, as early as has ever been the case here, yet with hindsight he says “if I wanted to be completely candid about it, we probably should have started a week earlier.” What genuinely noble rot there was (with one notable exception) “didn’t lend itself to sweet wine,” in his words, “because there was too little acidity,” though some felicitously botrytized musts informed reserve lots or were judiciously blended into the dry cuvees. While noting that he was at pains to preserve a sense of precision in the resultant wines, Lowenstein had no compunction about treating his vintage 2011 fruit to a, for him, typical 12-18 hours of pre-fermentative skin contact, further extended by some eight hours’ pressing. “The new, second press I got for 2010,” he notes, “is so quiet that I can run it overnight without my neighbor falling out of his bed; so now I press ‘round the clock and for as long as I want.” Asked whether he thought that some of these relatively low-acid (and without question specifically low-malic) wines underwent malo-lactic conversion Lowenstein replied “I’m not even going to analyze them to find out.” The present collection won’t by any means cause one to forget the singular, striking (and for that reason all “Reserve”-designated) 2010s turned out at this address, but it would be wise to leave most of those gems in the cellar for a while, while you could happily start drinking most of these 2011s right away. Imported by Ewald Moseler Selections, Portland, OR; tel. (888) 274-4312; and The Source Imports, San Francisco, CA; tel. (415) 621- 6151