Albert Boxler Sylvaner, Alsace, France

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Boxler’s 2006 Sylvaner is amazingly pure for its vintage and full of ripe pear and peach as well as redolent of bay leaf and mint. Quite opulent on the palate, it nonetheless displays a modicum of refreshing lime which – along with faint bitterness of citrus zest – helps to balance out the hint of residual sugar. This is transparent to considerable nuance, including low-tone meaty notes and hints of chalk. It should be enjoyed now. Jean Boxler emphasizes the contrast between one of the earliest and hastiest harvest ever at his family’s estate – “just three days after I finished bottling the 2005s, and then every day, including Sunday” – in order to salvage clean fruit in 2006; and the protracted harvest of 2007. “In fact,” he explains, “I started in 2006 with the intention of harvesting grapes for cremant, but they were already too ripe.” Thanks to meticulous vineyard practices and early picking, a surprisingly consistent and satisfying collection resulted. “Half the fruit was already on the ground,” he observes, by the time he could pick his best sites. Boxler’s crew knows the difference between good and bad botrytis, he assured me, yet even so, each carried a second bucket into which to drop any fruit about which uncertainty remained, and those lots were subjected to test pressings and severe scrutiny, generally ending up discarded. Boxler’s best 2007s are predictably finer, more structured, and more refined, although the vintage’s superiority is only obvious when it comes to single-vineyard bottlings. “I could live with a vintage like it every year,” he quips. When asked about his aspirations and his role in upholding the reputation of his family’s extraordinary estate, Jean Boxler says he does not want to get any bigger so as to keep complete control, and adds that he doesn’t have a single day free from his vineyards and cellar to go out and sell wine anywhere, so Americans should please not feel offended that he hasn’t – save for a brief, youthful stage in Oregon – ever visited them!Importer: Robert Chadderdon Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 757-8185