2018 - Felseneck Riesling GG, Schafer-Frohlich

Zesty lime and struck flint pungency are joined on the nose by intimations of white currant and white peach as well as of alkaline, saline sea breeze. The midpalate is firm but polished, dense and full (at around 13% alcohol), yet exhibits an improbable sense of lift, with crunchy, taut-fruit freshness and cheek-pinching brightness such as one seldom witnesses from this vintage. The superbly focused, preternaturally persistent finish is vibrantly tongue-tingling, crushed-stone-saturated, mouthwateringly saline and refreshingly loaded with primary juiciness. Yet for all of the brightness on display here, there are also resonant, deep, piquant nuttiness and a low-toned stoniness suggestive of tectonic tension. “Based on my impressions in autumn [2018],” said Fröhlich – lovely though he claimed the harvest was – “you could never have gotten me to believe that we would end up with a wine like this.” And talk about the scarcely believable: Fröhlich left out of this cuvée a roughly thousand-bottle lot of Felseneck that was due to spend a second winter in cask, and which he thinks represents his finest dry wine of the vintage. Like its Stromberg counterpart but to an even more striking degree, this bottling illustrates a point on which I elaborated when introducing the Schäfer-Fröhlich 2017s – namely, that Bockenau’s top slopes take a back seat to none on the Nahe.