2011 Schlehdorn Riesling

The intense gripping Kuhn 2011 Riesling trocken Schledorn mingles fruit pits and citrus rinds, stone and iodine, resinous herbs and hints of oak (from a third-use demi-muid) on a full and firm yet persistently bright and juicy palate. The energy this applies in its finish is truly mouth-shaking, not to mention refreshing, so that no impression of excessive austerity emerges. I would plan on employing it through at least 2018. Kuhn was the most nervous of many nervous Rheingau vintners whom I visited in the third week of September, 2011, and he had begun harvesting in fear that the weather might continue warm and rainy and that any later start would make it impossible to salvage an entire crop. “We couldn’t believe how the weather then turned,” he related a year later, “to the extent that we didn’t even have to go picking over a couple of weekends but could rest up. And at the end, I was almost sorry the harvest was over, as the weather was still so good.” As just intimated, Kuhn was too preoccupied with the consequences of rain falling on his ripe bunches to spend much time with me in September, 2011. His wife Angela explained at the time that they had indulged in some de-acidification of 2010 vintage musts with calcium carbonate (as in 1994, too), simply to guarantee the malolactic transformation that is understood for dry wines at this address, encouraging long-term stability with minimal or no filtration and low sulfur. Incidentally, Kuhn is renewing and expanding his range of 1,200-liter Stuckfasser with ones of local Taunus oak selected on site by Austrian cooper Franz Stockinger. But to the extent that significant percentages of new or young oak have been used, it has only occasionally resulted in diminution of Riesling- or site-typical virtues. (And as at Von Winning in the Pfalz, where my similar and contemporaneous concerns about the influence of new wood have largely been similarly assuaged, this changing of the cellar guard has been limited to a brief period in time.) Imported by Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608-9644; also imported by Domaine Select Wine Estates, New York, NY; tel. (212) 279-0799