This delicious dry German Riesling is just chock full of flavour – much more than most wines at this relatively humble QbA level, a bottling of wines from various holdings in the village of Wachenheim rather than a Grosses Gewächs from a single one of Bürklin-Wolf's celebrated specific sites in Deidesheim, Forst, Ruppertsberg and Wachenheim – which sell for very much higher prices.
This estate was an early adopter of biodynamic practices in the vineyard and for many years has been producing wines with real intensity of flavour. (Purple Pagers may like to put Bürklin-Wolf in the tasting notes search to see proof of this.) The Grosse Gewächse will have a longer and more glorious life, but the advantage of this 2011 village wine is that it can be enjoyed straight away. Below is my tasting note taken this September and below that what our German wine specialist Michael Schmidt (whose warts-and-all report on the 2013 vintage in Germany will be published next week) wrote about it when he first tasted it in April 2012.
16.5 Drink 2012-2016
Lovely racy stuff with a deep undertow. Biodynamic gives depth of flavour? Lemon and lime but quite broad too. Wonderfully long. GV 13%
£13.50 Tanners
16 Drink 2012-2015
Citrus fruit on the nose with just a splash of peaches. Full bodied and rounded, but with enough juicy acidity to provide an attractive angle. Any residual sugar is kept well in check. Very convincing performance at the Pfalz 'village' level, dry, but generous with it. (MS)
This is a wine that could as easily be drunk without food as with charcuterie or many a fish dish. I see that it is also available in magnums, and would remind you just how handsome magnums of these tall, tapered bottles are. (I was reminded when I had the pleasure of sharing magnums of German Riesling with Annagret Reh-Gartner of von Kesselstatt in the Mosel and Theresa Breuer of Georg Breuer in the Rheingau earlier this week.)
I'm delighted to say that the wine is widely available – most obviously in Germany but also in Italy, Austria, Norway, the Czech Republic, Australia and Switzerland, and in the UK chez Tanners of Shrewsbury, who have always put more effort than most into their German selection. Unfortunately the wine does not seem to be available in the US, according to wine-searcher.com.
You can find out more about the estate, now in the hands of Bettina Bürklin-von Guradze (pictured) via their website.
