2008 Brauneberger Juffer Sonnenuhr Grosses Gewachs

The Haags’ 2008 Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr Riesling Grosses Gewachs features pineapple, white peach, and lemon, with smoky pungency that migrates from the nose to the wine’s relatively broad palate. Less energetic or elegant than the corresponding Juffer, this conveys considerable citrus rind and fruit pit bitterness along with persistent smokiness and wet stone character into a long but relatively austere finish. As is often the case with wines of the Grosses Gewachs genre, this is more impressive than it is fun to drink. Of course, it may well improve in bottle – and I certainly expect it to remain fresh for at least 5-7 years – but the same could be said for this year’s already much more appealing, refreshing, elegant, and (to borrow Oliver Haag’s own apt word) “filigree” Juffer trocken. Alcohol is not the issue, as the outstanding 2007 Juffer Spatlese trocken had the same 12.5% as this Grosses Gewachs. There was a time, though, when it seemed to me as if Wilhelm Haag believed that the Juffer was inherently better-suited to dry Riesling and I wonder whether that isn’t indeed the case. 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.” Importer: Rudi Wiest, Cellars International, Carlsbad, CA; tel. 800 596 9463.