Some fun wines from the past week:
2008 Willi Schaefer Graacher Domprobst Riesling Spätlese #10
Made of the same material as the fantastic Domprobst #5 I had a few weeks back with gorgeous floral aromatics, bright apple and lemony fruit and a bed of slate underneath. This doesn't have quite as much richness or the faint honeyed elements that the Spätlese #5 had, feeling a little lighter instead with rapier-like acidity giving it incredible precision and a seriously long, slate-filled finish with barely a hint of sweetness.
2001 Domaine de Chevalier
From a romantic little half bottle from a recent HDH sale, showing wonderful and ethereal aromas of wet newspaper, cardboard and other descriptors for TCA.
1999 Domaine de Chevalier
From another half bottle, though less romantic than the previous one. Incredibly tight and primary with lots of youthful dark fruit and wood. Nicely structured and balanced though inscrutable and hard to enjoy right now - needed a day of air for the primary fruit/oak to subside a little and allow other flavours to emerge. I'll keep away from my other halves for a few more years.
2007 Domaine Bernard Baudry Chinon La Croix Boissée
Fantastic wine. Starts out a bit gritty and a little backward with primary black olive and plummy flavours over earthy notes, but this really evolves and opens out with some air and food. With time the spine of grainy tannins softens and this picks up beautiful forestal, herbal and cedary flavour elements while the texture becomes much more elegant and silky to a point that it feels almost Chambolle-like, polished while incredibly light and precise with its bright acidity.
2007 Weingut Hirsch Grüner Veltliner Zöbinger Heiligenstein
Tightly wound and unyielding initially, but with time this opens nicely to show really pretty aromatics of white fruits, green beans and flowers that lead into a palate that' incredibly streamlined and precise; full of bright fruit and herbal notes with really refreshing acidity and a long finish.
2008 Van Volxem Saar Riesling Alte Reben
One of the best values I've found in dry Riesling, at about $25 this blows the doors off a lot of far higher end trockens from Austria and Germany with beautiful aromatics, a complex flavour profile full of pear and citrus fruits tinged with floral and stony elements and razor-sharp precision and clarity without ever feeling austere or too tart.
