Scharzhofberger Riesling Trockenbeerauslese 2011 Egon Muller

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Robert Parker (96)

The Muller 2011 Scharzhofberger Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese – which was not sold via auction – delivers peach preserves, honey, nougat and caramel mingled with prickly spice, piquant candied lemon rind and pungent sweat, for an exceedingly high-toned nose and correspondingly penetrating as well as viscous and creamy palate. There is an aura of varnished aromatic woods about this that some might think pushes the envelope in terms of volatility, but along with a persistent rivulet of bright fresh lemon and lime, it serves for pushback and counterpoint to the wine’s enormous sweetness. A saline, smoky animal savor to the wine’s prodigious, multifaceted finish renders it almost like having your morsel of foie gras in the glass. Expect this to outlive you unless you only recently became legally eligible to drink it in the U.S.A.

Egon Muller’s 2011 collection – tasted last September at the Scharzhof in his absence – represents an intensively selective harvest that extended from mid-October into November and resulted in one of the numerically smallest number of individual bottlings in the history of this venerable estate smaller even than the number from 20100, but also some that will go down as landmarks in that history. It seems that – by way of explaining this paucity – in the realm of Kabinett and Spatlese, the individual lots were simply deemed to harmonize well with one another and amalgamated; while in upper-Pradikat realms, the aggregate volume was no larger than in other recent vintages.