Last-harvested and even then at only 13% potential alcohol and with the highest acidity of any Prager wine this vintage, the 2010 Riesling Smaragd Wachstum Toni Bodenstein displays a nervous dynamic of juicy lime, grapefruit and peach with citrus rind bite, fruit pit piquancy, and bitter-tart notes of gooseberry. Nut oils and wet stone help ground a buoyant, firmly-textured palate and fill-out a refreshingly lingering finish. This nose-bleed site daringly planted in 1990 has never failed to fully ripen, but in 2010 one can at least perceive its location as a challenge rather than – as has often been the case – a blessing. I suspect this will be worth following for the better part of a decade. “True, we had higher than normal acid levels,” relates Toni Bodenstein, “but I did things differently than in other years; three things, namely. The first was to let the grapes hang especially long, and all of the Smaragd was harvested in November. Then, I employed up to 17 hours of skin contact, which reduced the acidity by a gram, sometimes even more. Of course, that was tartaric acid, but due to the long hang time and healthy fruit, we had a high ratio of tartaric. And after long fermentations – not ended before February – we added no sulfur whatsoever and retained the fine lees, which we then stirred weekly through April, making for even higher extract levels and more buffering. And given the high extract and low pH levels, these wines needed comparatively little sulfur at bottling, which with the exception of one early portion of Federspiel, took place in May. To have de-acidified them,” he concludes emphatically, “would have been to risk stripping them of their souls.” Given the tiny size of his crop, Bodenstein elected to forgo separate bottlings from two sites each in Riesling and Gruner Veltliner, instead supplementing his two Federspiel bottlings with that fruit (even if their vineyard designations on the labels stayed the same) “and even then,” he notes, “with Weitenberg and Liebenberg added into the Hinter der Burg, for example, I ended up with less than 50% of the volume of that Federspiel in 2009.”Importer: Winebow, Montvale, NJ; tel. (201) 445-0620
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