| 2011-03-14 15:48 |
WA: “From the first day of fermentation, I smelled this and got goose bumps,” says Klaus-Peter Keller of his 2009 Westhofener Abtserde Riesling Grosses Gewachs, and the same can be said of the finished wine, which – impressive as are those that preceded it in this year’s collection – plays in a different league. The dynamic complexity of elements for which one can find only mineral descriptors (and then very imperfect ones) is already astonishing: salt; chalk; alkali; shrimp shell reduction; iodine; and peat are already adumbrated on the nose and then spell-bindingly and intricately interwoven on a silken field with grapefruit, white peach, and Ranier cherry, nut oils and bitter-sweet floral perfume into a delectable, nearly demonic dance that leaves my mouth drooling and my tongue quivering helplessly in hopeful anticipation of the next sip. This transfixes and refreshes, yet greed still leaves me unsatisfied, and I fantasize about the Bishop of Worms – who once got first crack at the wine of Abtserde – denying me communion with this rarified and seemingly magical elixir. “The active lime content in this site is measurably enormous and unique among my vineyards,” notes Keller, convinced that its effects lie at the root of this Riesling’s animated complexity. A transparent exemplification of Keller’s Riesling ideals and of a great site, this will, I feel confident, continue to amaze for at least the next 15 years. (From vintage 2008, the name of the site was still disguised as a website address on labels of Keller wine from Abtserde by being written: Abts E.de. This year, that has been shortened to Abts E in a renewed attempt to avoid conflict with the legal proscription – in some regions treated as a technicality; in some selectively observed; in some rigorously enforced – on mentioning any of thousands of vineyard names that were officially eliminated by the 1971 Wine Law. I decided this wine is by now so justifiably well-known that we could simply write “Abtserde” for Wine Advocate purposes. Incidentally, Keller recently pushed back by more than 150 years – to 1380 – the first known reference to this “abbot’s plot.”)
Klaus-Peter Keller’s stylistic ideals and parameters – for more about whose application to vintage 2009 consult the quotes from him at two places in my introduction to this report – were aptly realized in a collection of Grosse Gewachse (all bottled in mid-August) that ranged from 12.5-13.5% in alcohol. “I can always cut away bunches,” he remarked apropos yields. “That merely means extra work. But you can’t hang new bunches on your vines, and in warm years, to have that third or fourth one is critical” to avoiding too rapid an accretion of sugar. The cool temperatures by the time he harvested his top sites in early November not only, claims Keller, offered the ideal circumstances for phenolic evolution and acid retention, but also for gentle extraction in the initial hours after harvest, when the fruit received the period of maceration that he believes is essential to getting at “the two-thirds of Riesling’s aromas are in its skin.” And as if the rest of the wines did not represent a sufficiently amazing performance, it concludes with no fewer than four Trockenbeerenauslesen (5 were planned, but the grapes left in Hubacker got rained-out), about which Keller claims not to know for sure whether it represents a record for his estate (though it definitely does for the period of his tenure, and – unbelievably – he repeated that record again in 2010). “Day in, day out we sorted grapes into the night,” relates Keller, but it should be borne in mind that the quantities of each of these T.B.A.s – as I have noted in each tasting note – remained minuscule. Keller is excited about 2009’s potential with Pinot as well, but surveying his finished 2008 Spatburgunder – all of which were moved solely by gravity, a forklift having served to elevate their assembled volumes for bottling – there is more than enough excitement generated by those as well to merit a search of the marketplace and to offer wine lovers a striking glimpse of the quality levels to which German Pinot Noir can successfully aspire. I’ll report on the 2009 reds next year. (For more about Keller’s governing principles with Riesling as well as Pinot, consult the introduction to my notes on his wines in issue 187.)
Imported by Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608 9644, Dee Vine Wines, San Francisco, CA tel. (877) 389-9463, and Frances Rose Imports Inc., Huntley, IL; tel. (815) 382 9533
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