Warm vintages have at least one up-side, namely Weingart’s Pinot Noir project of which the 2009 Spay Spatburgunder represents his fourth vintage. I tasted this wine in a proportional blend of its five barriques, and it’s likely to be the best yet in this consistently (and even Weingart would admit, improbably) fine series. Lots of millerandage yet moderate overall sugars (while not yet measured, Weingart estimates total alcohol at 13.25%) make for bright, distilled-strength cherry and purple plum concentration, allied to rose hip and underbrush. Fine-grained in tannin and incipiently silken, this bursts almost explosively on the palate and finishes with resonant fruit as well as persistent underlying sense of wet stone, salt, and forest floor. Weingart hypothesizes that at age seven, these vines’ roots may now have reached down into the dense slate – intermingled, surprisingly, with chalk – that underlies this site in the Spay portion of the Engelgarten Einzellage, a sector that was largely vine-free for two generations until he began clearing and re-planting. For notes on some recent developments at Florian Weingart’s estate, please consult my report in issue 187. While much has been done to improve vineyards and cellar, this young grower’s acute self-awareness and quality-consciousness continue as they have since he took over here, even as he has become one of his country’s most talked-about talents. And he would be the last to want readers to remain unaware that the wines rendered here when his father, Adolf, was in charge – of which I recently tasted a fresh, minerally-intense example that I had imported from the difficult 1987 vintage – were consistently good and often downright distinguished. Weingart reports some drought stress in 2009, but while he began picking already before mid October, Oechsle levels were universally high, which explains not only the relatively high alcohol of some of the dry wines (a phenomenon that’s been witnessed in these vineyards in quite a few recent vintages) but the lack of differentiation by that metric between those wines Weingart chose to bottle as Kabinett and those that became Spatlese. Acid levels were on the whole modest, on top of which several of Weingart’s 2009s – including a couple of the ones I thought among his finest, please note! – underwent at least partial malo-lactic transformation.Importer: Terry Theise Estate Selections, imported by Michael Skurnik Wines, Inc., Syosset, NY; tel. (516) 677-9300