2021 Vollenweider - Wolfer Goldgrube Kabinett

The 2021er Felsenfest, as it is referred to on the consumer label, is a dry wine (with 6 g/l of residual sugar) made from late harvested fruit harvested in the Estate’s Trabener Burgberg (2/3) and the Trarbacher Schlossberg (1/3). It offers a smoky nose of minty herbs, earthy spices, blackberry, greengage, licorice, and white minerals. The wine has quite some presence and intensity on the palate, where some earthy and broader elements make for a slightly large yet playful and fresh wine. The finish is very long and superbly intense. This is a great dry Riesling.

The acronym Breit comes from Hangenbriete, the name of the vineyard. The appellation rules for this wine were promulgated in 1976, and Mélanie’s father started making crémant in the early 1980s. From the first, he worked with a long aging period. Today, the Pfisters consistently make an unusually elegant, perfumed, top-end crémant. The wine rests on its lees for a minimum of twenty-four months (most French crémant, regardless of origin, ages on its lees for about nine months or so). There are three to four disgorgements of a given year’s production, and what you’re drinking could have aged as long as thirty-six months on its lees. This is a single-vintage wine without any older reserve wine, but the vintage is kept discreetly on the back label rather than printed on the front because of the multiple disgorgements.