A 2007 Bacharacher Kloster-Furstental Riesling Brut A.P. #17 displays the Ratzenbergers’ well-known talent for Sekt, its stony depth serving to set off lime and white peach, while toasted pumpkin seed, peat, and iodine add further interest that carries into a satisfyingly persistent finish. This low-toned, relatively austere bubbly (of which the A.P. #17 I tasted represents the first disgorgement) should hold up well to at least half a dozen years’ bottle age, not that many are likely to test what is by now a long-established track record for this genre at this address. I tasted from 2010 the smallest Ratzenberger line-up I could recall, due to the facts that fewer wines were bottled; the Norwegians had purchased a Wolfshohle Auslese without remainder; and the vintage’s two Grosse Gewachse were still fermenting at the time of my September visit. (I did taste the cloudy, leesy, still-embryonic St. Jost and found it formidably dense, pithy, and citric.) “We hadn’t de-acidified in more than twenty years,” claims the younger Jochen Ratzenberger, “but anybody who says they didn’t this year is lying.” He calls it “a hard autumn” with picking and pressing so onerous and time-consuming that “we were in the cellar until two and three every morning and in the end there was little to show for it. I don’t want to go through anything like it again soon.” The total volume was but half of a normal crop, with quantities at the Q.b.A. and Kabinett levels confined to what was felt to be the commercially requisite minimum. Fermentations were sluggish - sometimes kicking into malo -and for that reason even the lighter wines weren’t bottled until July. “You couldn’t do anything by rote, but had to keep tasting every lot as it evolved and each was different from the next,” adds Ratzenberger, who reports that in the best instances malic and tartaric acid levels were about equal by the time of picking.Imported by Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608-9644
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