The Tempe 2005 Riesling Saint-Hippolyte smells of elder flower, pungent herbs and honey, comes to the palate creamy in texture, impressively dense, and distinctly marked both by the lees and by ennobling botrytis, and finishes with an attractive note of salinity, but also the suggestions of slight dryness or bitterness on account of the botrytis. His 2005 Zellenberg Riesling, by contrast, was simply swamped by primary lees character and the bitterness of botrytis. (And at this by Tempe standards “youthful” juncture, anyway, I had trouble sorting out the fruit and terroir beneath the barrique in his 2005 Riesling Mambourg.) I found no group of wines I tasted this year in Alsace more challenging to assess than those of vinous adventurer Marc Tempe, whom some critics call an iconoclast and others a reactionary. He bottled his first wines in 1995, and has been working biodynamically for a decade. These wines ferment longer (without cultured yeast additions – Tempe’s aim is to “work as naturally as possible”) and reside in fuder or barriques longer (generally 2-3 years) than any others I know of in Alsace today. Malolactic fermentation generally takes place, although Tempe doesn’t force it, and as he hastens to point out, he works at yield and ripeness levels that have in recent years proved pretty inhospitable to malic acid! Tempe likes botrytis for the complexity it adds even in dry wines. Add to all of the above considerations a penchant for minimal if any doses of sulfur and you often have wines that – while in some sense “slow moving” – are not easy targets to capture in a momentary tasting note. I have therefore only published notes or scores on wines whose personalities I felt capable of grasping on the occasion of my visit, which naturally also meant wines far enough along in fermentation than were many of his 2005s.Importer: Vintage 59 Imports, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 966 9218.
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