Weingut Clemens-Busch Pundericher Marienburg Riesling Auslese Erste Lage, Mosel, Germany

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Ginger, cardamom, vanilla, pear, caramel, and a whiff of yeast in the nose of Busch’s 2009 Pundericher Marienburg Riesling Auslese put me in mind of a freshly baked spice and pear cake, an impression mouth-wateringly reinforced by a creamy richness of texture and a deep, savory, saline, browned-butter streak. At the same time, the delicacy of this delectable Auslese borders on weightless. It can’t equal the intrigue, interplay, or sheer length of the corresponding Spatlese, but it, too, should be worthy of 20 years’ attention. “It was no lovely autumn,” notes Clemens Busch candidly. “We had to pick our botrytis wines very early. We had regular rain from the end of October on, and one really had to take great advantage of the dry days to finish.” Busch reports that while his lower-tier lots largely fermented unproblematically to dryness, his riper single-vineyard bottlings were sluggish, several ending up in the legally halbtrocken territory that I have personally tended to prefer at this address, not least because of the tendency for the trocken lots to betray elevated alcohol. Busch – for more about whose methods, style, and vineyards consult the estate introductions as well as the tasting notes in others of my recent Mosel reports – is unwilling to employ cultured yeasts or otherwise intervene to achieve legal dryness. In view of an unfounded and frankly uninformed phobia many Riesling lovers have when it comes to the very idea, it should be pointed out that most of Busch’s dry-tasting Rieslings have since 2001 undergone malo-lactic transformation. That did not however happen with his 2008s (whose high pH levels precluded it) and only selectively with these 2009s. Furthermore, in Busch’s cellar, this transformation – normally not profound, as his ripe fruit is typically not high in malic acid – generally takes place as an interruption during – rather than subsequent to – the alcoholic fermentation. This peculiarity, he contends, explains the absence of diacetyl or other problematic potential byproducts. Even the lighter cuvees here were not bottled until the three weeks leading up to my mid-September visit, and among those wines then being prepped for bottling were a Felsterrasse and Raffes too shaken-up from filtration for me to judge. That the nobly sweet wines here are as notable for their high quality as their abundance I suppose doesn’t need repeating, provided you survey my ratings.Mosel Wine Merchant Trier, Germany (various importers); tel. (413) 429-6176; +49 (0) 651 14551 38; also imported by Ewald Moseler Selections, Portland OR tel. 888 274 4312

Cinnamon, honey, quince jelly, orange liqueur, Chartreuse-like herbal distillate, lemon zest, chamomile, and lily all sequentially scent Busch’s 2008 Pundericher Marienburg Riesling Auslese, which then saturates the palate with very sweet, elixir-like liquid floral perfume, herbal essences, pit fruit preserves, and citrus. There is as much lift and length here as in the corresponding gold capsule Spatlese, but in addition more complexity. Incidentally, there are only 200-300 liters each of Busch’s more site-specific and gold capsule 2008 Auslesen, and around 600 of this one. Clemens Busch – for more about whose impressive efforts in organically farming diverse sites the length of the long, steep Marienburg consult my reports in issues 179 and 185 – pushed many of his 2008s to extremes of dryness or sweetness. The majority of his dry-tasting wines – most of which did not finish fermenting until early summer – were rendered legally trocken (some of them offered as Grosse Gewachse and some to be released late), and while alcohol per se was seldom a problem this year, I found some of these wines austere, inelegant and charmless. (Dry wines here, incidentally, often go through malolactic transformation, but apparently due to such low pHs in 2008, only a single lot did so. There was however, reports Busch, extensive tartrate precipitation, which lowered the levels of tartaric acid, but automatically enhanced the ratio of green apply malic acidity.) This is not to say there aren’t many bottlings I found impressive and even beautiful in the present collection, especially – for those who don’t mind very prominent sweetness – the range of ennobled wines. Busch didn’t even launch his pre-harvest passes through the vineyards until nearly mid-October, and began serious harvesting only toward the end of that month, finishing in the third week of November, “but,” as he says, “it was a harvest that demanded a lot of time, because one day you could pick, and the next you had to wait due to inclement weather, and the botrytis often developed negatively”, demanding painstaking selection. Apropos the precariousness of Mosel wine culture, here is an amazing statistical anecdote Busch offered. The quality and character of his wines, he believes, is dependent on the high percentage of ancient vines trained in the traditional manner (a.k.a. Stockkultur) to a single stake, with two canes. A single, middle-aged woman who has no protegee is responsible for binding the canes on 80% of Busch’s roughly 25 acres of vines, a talent she acquired out of personal passion, and one that only a handful of even septuagenarian Moselaner any longer possess!Mosel Wine Merchant selections (various importers), Trier, Germany; fax 011 49 (0)651-14551 39; also imported by Ewald Moseler Selections, Portland OR tel. 888 274 4312