Community Tasting Note

• forceberry wrote: 88 points

  April 22, 2017 - Tasted blind in Kabinett Cup 2015. 7% alcohol.
  
  Pale green color. Very stuffy and reductive nose that does not open up at all during the evening, offering nothing more than sulfurous hard-boiled egg aromas and hints of acrid smoke. The wine is light-to-medium-bodied, medium-sweet and very racy on the palate with focused primary flavors of tart lemony citrus fruits, juicy red apples, some grapey fruit, a little bit of reductive hard-boiled egg character, a hint of honey and a touch of gunpowder smoke. The wine feels very juicy, but also quite reductive still. The finish is long, ripe and moderately sweet, but also quite reductive with pungent sulfidic burn, some sulphurous rotten egg notes and a hint of gunpowder smoke along with hints of Granny Smith apple and lemon marmalade.
  
  This was a very wonderful Kabinett Riesling, were it not for the very pronounced reduction. It feels as though the wine has been given a dose of sulfites a bit too big, and some of the sulfites have reduced to become smelly sulfur compounds. You can taste that the quality here is impeccable and the balance between the acidity and the moderately high sweetness is incredibly fine, but the reductive qualities detract a lot from the pleasure. Seeing this wine is bottled under a screw cap, I really hope that the reductive qualities blow off with age - at least the wine feels like it is built to last for a long time in a cellar. If the wine is to be opened young, decant it vigorously just to blow some of the reduction away - although I doubt this much skunk will dissipate in any short period of time. The wine needs at least a few years just to get out of its very primary phase, and perhaps more than a decade to lose its skunky reduction. This wine received no points in our Kabinett Cup of 32 Rieslings from 2015, but a few people commented that this would've been a serious contender were it not so darn skunky. Shows a lot of promise.

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3 Comments

• hermesbach32 commented:

  2/22/18, 12:46 AM - Giving a wine a too high dose of sulfites leads to the opposite of the phenomenon you are describing. The "boiled egg" flavours that your are describing are coming from storing a wine a bit too long on the lees and this flavour will disappear with longer storage. But giving a wine a too high dose of sulfites has nothing to do with this phenomenon at all because this does not create reductive tendencies.

• forceberry commented:

  2/22/18, 2:34 AM - Thank you for your comment! However, please do note that I wrote that there are both reductive notes (hard-boiled eggs) as well as sulfidic notes (acrid smoke, gunpowder, harsh finish). The wine feels both reductive AND feels like it is a bit higher in sulfites. Nothing wrong in that, that is quite typical of sweeter wines.
  
  It is completely true that skunky H2S aromas often emerge when the wine is aged in reductive environment, i.e. in stainless steel (no ingress of oxygen) with the fine lees (which effectively gob up any remaining oxygen).

• forceberry commented:

  2/22/18, 2:35 AM - I would also love to know what you mean by the opposite phenomenon.

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