2008 Bockenauer Felseneck Spatlese Goldkapsel

This came from perfectly ripe, really tiny, rot-free but in some cases shriveled golden berries, picked two weeks after its regular Spatlese counterpart, notes Frohlich about the 2008 Bockenauer Felseneck Riesling Spatlese Gold Capsule, but I wouldn’t have wanted to use them in Grosses Gewachs, he adds because I don’t want more than 13% alcohol there. This is free of the fermentative notes – other than a delicious aura of baking bread – that are displayed by several other sweet wines in this collection, whereas more typically this bottling serves as a repository for them. Lift and elegance even with creamy richness, as well as a marvelous transparency to saline savor and crushed stone in its long, luscious finish enhance the charms of this doubtless 20 or more year Riesling. The overall effect is livelier, lighter, more refined, and less obviously sweet than the normal Felseneck Spatlese, offering a delectable sample of what Grosses Gewachs quality fruit at this estate becomes if finished with residual sugar. I have devoted a lot of attention to the wines of the Frohlich family and the emergence of Tim Frohlich as one of Germany’s star wine makers (see for instance my accounts in issues 161 and 167), and by now I am surely not the only wine writer to be almost tapped-out of superlatives. But the hits just keep coming, and the 2008 vintage Schafer-Frohlich collection represents another amazing achievement. Tim Frohlich keeps finding new ways to push the qualitative envelope, and in 2008 one of them was through sheer delay of harvest, which didn’t really get going here until the first of November and, according to his account, “went on for 27 uninterrupted days. I won’t try to tell you that we were never nervous about this approach,” he added wryly, “but in all that time we didn’t lose any acidity or freshness in the wines, they remained perfectly brilliant.” Indeed, the effects of such long hang time incorporate phenomenal levels of concentration but – as far as I am able to report – harbored no down-sides. (Quantity was another matter: the crop was small even by this estate’s recent standards.) Frohlich believes that such extended hang time – even when the foliage has fallen and concentration is largely via dehydration – pays dividends of complexity and elegance in small-berried, low yielding Riesling vines, and it’s precisely grapes of this sort than inform his Grosse Gewachse. While nobly sweet wines were (as my tasting notes explain) more oriented toward block picking than classic selection this year, that does not mean there was less work on the sorting tables. On the contrary, Frohlich reports that the effects of sporadic esca (a fungal disease increasingly pernicious in California as well as Europe that leaves afflicted portions of bunches hard to identify until you handle or taste them) kept his team up until 2 and 3 many mornings. Meanwhile, each year we just keep lengthening and widening the tables and putting on more people, he remarked in a tone of resignation. Stringent control of temperature in the numerous compartments of his cellar; re-apportionment of lees; plus selective and judicious use of cultured yeasts (it seems like yesterday when Frohlich first experimented with spontaneous fermentations, but now they represent the rule here) enabled him to achieve the volumetric majority of trocken wine that his German market demands. Incidentally, the Frohlichs have continued to add prime acreage in Bockenau on top of the major investments made several years ago in Schlossbockelheimer Felsenberg and Monzinger Halenberg and Fruhlingsplatzchen, so that virtually 100% of their wine – including generic bottlings – now comes from estate fruit. Importer: Rudi Wiest, Cellars International, Carlsbad, CA; tel. (800) 596-9463