Community Tasting Note

sweetstuff wrote:

Friday, October 8, 2010 - nb: FOR THE SAKE OF THOSE WHO NEED A BRIEFER NOTE AND A TERSER IMPRESSION, A SHORT-FORM NOTE WILL FROM NOW ON BE PREPENDED IF POSSIBLE FOR THESE RATHER VERBIOSE NOTES OF GREAT LENGTH. tHIS IS OF COURSE NOT A BLOG AND EVENTUALLY i HOPE TO SEPARATE THE tns FROM THE blogging.

AP 3 561 083 5 00. 7.5 pabv; $60/375 ml after buyer premium; WineBid.com. Imported by Rudi Weist Cellars International, San Marcos, CA.

A wine with which Barbara and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary, a truly golden era for both of us, and worth a stunning bottle. Shared at Hawthorne Suites in Cincinnati.

Color is rich, polished, adamantine gold over medium green tea. A thick, unbroken coating of extract. harmoniously delicate nose, like a Haydn quartet. It is a wine that for now is contained within itself, waiting to be coaxed from its shyness, but the shyness seems something of a game. There is a sawn-pine pungency waiting in the background to spring to life, and hints of mountain strawberry.

The opening palate impression is of first-flush Darjeeling tea of the highest quality. The acid and sugar are bound up in a razor-edge that at first is painful to taste. The primary note is again of a fine tea, with an orange and strawberry flavor of great clarity, length, and with the precision of an optical laser. The only thing holding this wine back from a higher score is a need for it to integrate a bit more in the mid-palate or to the sides of the tongue; after some time it may be worth another point. Barbara, who is fascinated with the way these wines change over time, will be following this with me over the next several days, too.

A third-day relook (refrigerated, but not decanted) shows fruit that's more tea-driven and more evident botrytis of the 'thick' variety; there's still a great deal of purity to the nectarine-juice impressions, but there are neat flashes of curing hay, a somewhat vanilla-like component there as well, called coumarin. All in all much more pleasant to drink than it was on the eighth,wwith less punch but without the painful tongue-dissecting act of before, out of the same bottle. I'm thankful to have had an opportunity to spend some extended time with this bottle (and with the one in whose honor it was poured, my delightful and intelligent wife Barbara.) Give this one another 3-5 years to smooth the edges, and drink from 2015 to 2050 and perhaps longer. No hurry at all, and a superb candidate for prolonged aging. For those of you who know your cellaring, 2018 to 2020 will start to show some tertiary fireworks. So drink circa 2013; then forgeddaboudit till 2018. A truly superb bottle in the making. 97/100.

We brought along a caramel apple from Winans in Dayton to nibble and a better match could not be imagined.

David Schildknecht claims that this is an auction lot, but it was not so designated by a VDP Versteigerungs circle on the bottle. There must have been a change in plans, because of recent years the three Auction ausleses have been numbered AP 03, 02, and 01 for the White Capsule Auction Auslese, the Goldkap Auction Auslese, and the Long Gold Cap Auction Auslese.

This is in any sane world a Trockenbeerenauslese, one of the greatest Zilliken Auslesen, or any Zilliken wine, for that matter, that I've ever had the pleasure to taste. How Hanno Z. is able to make such a powerful wine so invitingly drinkable is part of the secret of his art, which may not be something he can pass on to the next generation--but we hope so.

(97 pts.)

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