I am right now in the process of a major cellar reorganization necessitated by the water company's "need" to replace my water meter. "We need a space at least 2 feet by 2 feet" around the meter to do the service" they say, so that means I have to schlep a bunch of boxes out of the cellar as well as remove on of my double deep wire racks. Luckily the rest of the basement is still below ideal wine cellar temperature, so there's no worry about storage issues. Also this gives me the impetus to finally get back to some state of reasonable organization in the cellar. The Muscadet is now all in one place and accessible, rather than stuffed in boxes behind 2005 German Rieslings that will not be opened until I am no longer physically able to move the boxes. And the Christoffel is all together again. I'm sure that's a great relief to everyone.
Anyway it's surprising how much more real the inventory is once I've seen/touched most of the bottles. The Excel spreadsheet and CellarTracker dual systems have always told me what I have, but it's different when you actually put your hands on 200-odd bottles of dessert wine. Thus I opened one:
The wine that is the subject of this post (there's no way I'm typing all of that again) is a beautiful bronze/gold color that looks older than it is. There's also a hint of thickness apparent in pouring. Initially the aromatics are all about apricots. There's fresh apricots, dried apricots and some kind of spiced apricot chutney all swirling around not only in the glass, but in the air as well. This wine is nothing if not effusive. A little air and a lot of warming brings out more of a nutty character, as well as some spring field green-ness (there's that Grüner typicity), making the overall apricot festival that much more interesting. There's also a hint of volatility on the nose that tells me we have about 500 ml of botrytis in a 375 ml bottle. While I enjoy elements of botrytis enoblement in my wines I am not a huge fan of wines that are dominated by botrytis, especially as they get older. To my senses the botrytis becomes dominant at the expense of varietal character, site (for site specific wines) and I end up tasting volatile, spiced honey and not much else. The flavors of the wine echo the apricot, nut and subtle green notes of the aromatics (not surprising given the sheer volume of the wine). The overall balance is very good, and Laura and I are able to enjoy a couple of decent size shared pours, leaving a little of the wine to check Sunday night. For right now I am going to opt for drinking up my remaining bottles soon, as I am a little worried about the level of botrytis and the potential for VA to become dominant. A last pour with 24 hours of air will also be telling.