2008 Brauneberger Juffer Sonnenuhr Auslese 6

Peach, pink grapefruit, and fig dominate the Fritz Haag 2008 Braunebeger Juffer-Sonnenuhr Riesling Auslese A.P. #6 – of which there are a goodly 1,100 liters – accented by brown spices and caramel from botrytis. A faintly oily texture underscores the wines overall richness and the finish is sumptuous, soothing, yet at the same time stimulating, if not quite so juicy and invigorating as its Juffer counterpart. This harbors amazing nooks and crannies of nuance, hinting at red fruits, honey, and mineral salts, and once can anticipate three decades of delight from it. ||Oliver Haag began picking already before the mid-point of October, but the results testify to his having had fully ripe grapes. “We did a lot of leaf-pulling and an extensive pre-harvest thinning this year,” he points out, adding that “the Auslesen were picked largely at the end of October, not too late. One picking was intended for Beerenauslese, but it didn’t appeal to me for that character, considering what good wines we have had in recent years, so I declassified that fruit into gold capsule Auslese.” Haag has this year dropped the Pradikat designations from all of his dry-tasting wines (and “Juffer” from what used to be "Juffer Kabinett"), while bottled his Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr-Sonnenuhr trocken as Grosses Gewachs. The idea is not only to simplify and to create a convention that non-Pradikat wines taste dry or nearly-so, but also to return to something more like the labeling that prevailed before 1971. But putting the words “Erste Lage” on the label of wines from the Sonnenuhr – in keeping with a VDP-wide program – actually adds further impetus to fatuous consumer questions. As all close students and lovers of Burgundy know, the words “premier cru” on a label mean increasingly little, and the best sites or portions of sites nowadays achieve their price and due reverence regardless of whether the label indicates “premier cru.” Wine Advocate.February, 2010