2011 Bockenauer Felseneck Beerenauslese

The Schafer-Frohlich 2011 Bockenauer Felseneck Riesling Beerenauslese returns the taster to northerly orchard fruits, notably nectarine and white peach, as such calling to mind this year’s magnificent corresponding gold capsule Spatlese – or for that matter even, this B.A.’s 2010 counterpart. To be sure, there is a honeyed overlay here – and even a hint of white raisin – but also an animating juiciness of fresh grapefruit and lime along with a veritable sizzle from their rinds. The concentration of acids (quantitatively around 9 grams/liter) and phenols here is formidable indeed, and reflects among other things the effect of late harvest strongly influenced by cold nights. This finishes with blazing, vibrant, invigorating intensity as well as mouthwatering salinity and ought to be worth revisiting over the next 3-4 decades. Tim Frohlich began harvesting not long after the beginning of October, 2011 and finished (with his Grosse Gewachse) by the end of that month, a timetable he had already predicted when I met with him in late August. “Dry conditions and above all the low nighttime temperatures were enormously important in 2011, and distinguished it from other warm, early vintages,” opines Frohlich, adding that “vintage 2003 was the most important of my life, because I learned not to panic but to wait; and those grapes that were harvested latest were the best.” Frohlich reports very little botrytis at any point during his 2011 harvest, so that nobly sweet wines were produced only in unusually small quantities; by dint of especially rigorous selection, and as much from spontaneously shrunken (tiny to begin with), healthy, super-ripe berries. “I had thirty pickers,” relates Frohlich (for more of whose observations consult the general introduction to this report) “twice our normal crew, with six or seven people – ladies who had long fingernails – doing nothing but picking-out raisins.” He’s quick to add that scarce though those overripe or botrytized berries were, even a small number left in the material utilized for a Grosses Gewachs could easily have driven alcohol levels well over Frohlich’s roughly 13% target, to say nothing of possible effects on purity of fruit, precision of flavors, and minerality, all virtues that – like other recent Schaefer-Frohlich collections – these 2011s possess in spades. The fruit that informed this year’s remarkable Schaefer-Frohlich Grosse Gewachse was in his words “tiny, golden yellow, glowing, and knackig” – crunchy, i.e., with skins possessed of the requisite firmness, to capture only the positive aspects of which, he personally manned the presses to insure precise control over every last 2011 lot. “You could get heartburn contemplating spontaneous fermentation in a low-acid vintage like this,” notes Frohlich, who nowadays only rarely resorts to cultured yeasts, “but thankfully, the pH levels were relatively high,” which greatly increases a grower’s margin of safety. Judging by the results, everything went off with nary a hitch! Imported by Rudi Wiest, Cellars International, Carlsbad, CA; tel. 800 596 9463