The Sundial At Wehlen

I claimed, starting this thing, that I would occasionally be posting on wine.  I’ve tasted a couple of extraordinary bottles in the interim but have been lax providing notes.  The most impressive wine I’ve tasted, in perhaps the last two years, came courtesy of a good friend and was served blind in a flight of Rieslings.   It was a 1994 J.J. Prum Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese.  

The much spoken about “petrol” notes in these sorts of wines came to me as Deet, as in N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide, the insect repellent found in Deep Woods Off.  That sounds … well … repellent … but in this case it was magnetic.  It really is a “you had to be there” aroma.  The wine had earth and mineral notes and while incredibly sweet (it’s an auslese, so botrytis effected and concentrated) was possessed of such bracing acidity as to be crisp as an apple fresh off the tree.  (I recently tasted a 1999 Suduiraut with similarly balanced sugars to ph). There were dominant malic things going on, poire as well as pomme, but touches of marmalade, apricot and marzipan.  Endlessly fascinating for the crowd sniffing at it and guessing what it might be.  Unctuous mouthfeel yet palate cleansing.  Nothing cloying. I thought, for a moment, that it might be one of the finest of those long-in-the-bottle sweet Chenin Blancs from the Loire but reasoned, finally, given the company in the blind, that it was Riesling.  I have tasted some of these wines earlier in their evolution and, while appealing. they can seem simple, one dimensional.  At maturity there are no wines more complex. You could sniff this Prum for hours and remain intrigued.  It comes in at a hard-to-believe 7% alcohol yet is more profound and powerful than most wines with twice the booze. It even had an attractive brandied/candied note. Miraculous taste making and viticulture on show here.  Chapeau!