[wine] Germany 2010 Vintage

May be worht it to hear Terry Theise "spin" this one.... http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2011/07/01/germanys-bizarro-2010-vinta… Germany.s bizarro 2010 vintage Posted on 07/01/2011 at 9:03 am by Jon Bonnén Wine, Winemakers The Rotenfels vineyard in the Nahe, a site nearly as intense as the 2010 wines. (Photo: German Wine Institute) Next to the bearded lady and the four-leaf clover in the Curiosities folder, you can place Germany.s 2010 vintage. An odd combination of rain and hail, and general lack of sunshine until the very crucial end of the vintage . buoyantly termed a .Golden October. by the Germans . caused a drastic reduction in crop, by an average 25 percent, and produced a heck of an anomaly. By .anomaly,. I mean a year that left pretty much everyone violently shaking their heads. No one has come up with an apt comparison to any other year. And so, just in time for 31 Days of German Riesling, arriving today, a crazy dose of Riesling. That might be because the 2010 wines are concentrated in a way virtually no one has ever tasted . little powerhouses of purity. .Forget .vinosity.,. wrote importer Terry Theise in his annual catalog, .these babies are as dense as paperweights.. (Even better is a quote Theise included, which I.ll heist and pass along here, from Johannes Geil in the Rheinhessen: .This year we didn.t really discuss the crop; we knew the names of each berry..) I queried Theise on the vintage a few months ago, because the head-scratching had begun even before tanks finished fermenting. He was still struggling to get his head around the wines, which are marked by remarkably high sugar levels and even ridiculously high levels of acidity. While recent years have given a surplus of sugar, the acids in 2010 saw that sugar and raised it. By about a million bucks. These wines are very much turned up to 11. Acid, be gone Which brings us to 2010.s tricky little side story. Most wines were so high in acid that even some of the most hidebound vintners were typically forced to de-acidify. (Mostly by the use of calcium carbonate; more on that here.) Germans don.t much cotton to tinkering with their wines, so to yank out crucial acid, just to make it drinkable? Well, this must have been one heck of a vintage. Thus it was with major curiosity that Theise.s annual tasting of German wines rolled into town this week. How were the wines? Really hard to parse. Even in this first brief glance (although Theise.s tastings are nearly canonical in RieslingWorld), most usual rules of thumb went out the window. Take a wine like the A.J. Adam Dhroner Riesling, a dry bottling from one of my favorite Mosel producers. It was opulent and nearly impossible to understand . mute in one moment, showing off a polished honeycomb aspect the next. One of Adam.s sweet efforts, the Dhron Hofberg Kabinett, had that same polished aspect, with fermentation aromas still lingering. There wasn.t the electricity I had come to expect, as though the intensity was wrapped in wool; I wondered if the wines received malolactic fermentation, almost unheard of in German Riesling but occasionally used this wacky year. When I later asked Theise about the wines, he said they.d been showing gorgeously in New York. .YMMV [your mileage may vary],. he wrote. Could that be the motto for the vintage? The TBA that shall not speak its name Then came were freak wines. The Selbach-Oster Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Rotlay, for instance, showed up without a Pradikat (kabinett, spatlese, etc.) level . mostly because Johannes Selbach wanted to highlight this teensy parcel within the Sonnenuhr vineyard without falling back on classifications. But also because the wine was picked with sugar levels that qualify as Trockenbeerenauslese (at least 150 degrees Oechsle), yet with ridiculous acidity that placed it in a completely other realm. I had no reference point, beyond it being crazy good. Emphasis on both words. As counterpoint, the Merkelbach Urziger Wurzgarten Beerenauslese. I was shocked to find it in a full 750ml bottle (BAs are almost always in half bottles) until I realized that another vintner might have labeled it a Spatlese, but Merkelbach took the forthright step of slapping a true Pradikat level on the bottle rather than quietly classifying it downward. And it tasted like a Spatlese on steroids. The flavors just hung out in my mouth for a few minutes, refusing to leave. The tiny Nahe region appeared as a stronghold of finesse in 2010. Harald Hexamer had to resort to a touch of de-acidifcation to bring his edgy wines into line. But his Rheingrafenberg Kabinett and In Den Felsen Spatlese both found ways to harness the beauty of ridiculous acidity . 10.4 grams/liter of acid and up, about double what you.d find in a California Chardonnay. Flavors of lemongrass and fern and grapefruit not only burst forth; they pretty much smacked me in the face. Of course there was Donnhoff, perhaps the most famous of Theise.s estates, etched and already beautifully showy. Witness the twofer of Oberhauser Brucke wines from Donnhoff.s wholly owned vineyard, crafted from two sides of the same grape bunches. The sun-exposed halves went into the Auslese Goldkapsel, the others into the Spatlese. The Auslese was lush but invigorating, while the Spatlese showed a weightlessness, like a Kabinett on overdrive. .My wines should be a little bit like fresh spring water,. Cornelius Donnhoff told me by way of understatement. Throw out the rules If his were a spring, some wines provided a waterfall. A wine like the Meulenhof Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spatlese, usually a bit shy when young, was flat-out electric . full of stone and green apple flesh, already with perfect pitch. But others seemed a bit too twitchy, perhaps overwhelmed by their acid. In the end? Question marks. There have been many preliminary rules of thumb on 2010 . dry wines will be too austere, typically rich Pfalz wines be snappy and lean. I suspect we.ll throw most of those out; these wines have no obvious corollaries. But some true successes are already clear. Witness a lineup like that of Johannes Leitz, who engaged in some moderate de-acidification (he gave me a recap on how the process also removed harsh oxalic acid, typically found in rhubarb). His most unkempt, rowdy effort? The popular Eins Zwei Dry, which follows a bit of that party line about dry wines in .10. But his benchmark Dragonstone was charged and powerful, with acidity to nearly transcend its sweet profile (at 90 degrees Oechsle, it.s well into Spatlese territory). That charged sensation came through even more directly in Leitz.s Rudesheimer Berg Roseneck Spatlese. It exuded the presence of a nectarine at its perfect point of ripeness, with some current (as in electricity, not as in little red fruit) running through. It.s a galvanizing wine. From a galvanizing year that offered rollercoasters in a bottle. Rather than listen to endless blather about another Bordeaux vintage to die for (or die paying for), I.d prefer to contemplate a vintage that wants to Taser me into appreciation. . Whew! For those of you diligent enough to stick it out until the end, a bonus photo from our Teutonic friends. And so 31 Days of Riesling begins . now. Do not cross the Riesling. (Photo: German Wine Institute) -- ------------------------------ * Dr. James Ellingson, jellings(a)me.umn.edu * * mobile : 651/645-0753 * * Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 * * james(a)brewingnews.com James.Ellingson(a)StThomas.edu *