During the 1990s, Toni Bodenstein bottled an extraordinary series of tiny, nobly sweet lots, and his 2009 Riesling Beerenauslese Achleiten – from must of T.B.A. weight, and tasted from tank this June – demonstrates that he has not entirely lost interest in, let alone his touch, with this genre. Mirabelle and Rainier cherry, musky floral perfume and a hint of human sweat and leather intriguingly scent this lusciously-fruited, texturally polished, yet pungently spicy elixir. A site-typical sense of wet stone that one doesn’t expect to find in a nobly sweet wine follows this one through its long, honeyed, bittersweetly cyanic finish. With its 11.5% alcohol, this decadently darkly-shaded Riesling understandably reveals less sheer sweetness than is usual in its genre, but it retains a fine sense of levity. These 500 liters from a few rows in the lower section of Achleiten had incidentally only been sulfured once in their lifetime, though they were about to receive a second dose at bottling, soon after I tasted.“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