White peach, elderberry-, quince, and musk on the nose of the Ratzenberger 2007 Bacharacher Wolfshohle Riesling Spatlese lead to a gorgeous, improbable palate alliance of freshness with creaminess and brightness with buoyancy and a finish of palate staining intensity and lip-smacking, tongue-tingling tangerine, peach, salt, and tart black fruits. This came from a relatively recently-acquired parcel with old vines deeply-colored berries, and tiny clusters, which this year they did not even attempt to thin-out. Jochen Ratzenberger Jr. expressed delight with his 2007s, and even though I’m straining to recollect a vintage with which he wasn’t pleased, the truth is, he and his father comprise one of the most consistently high-performance teams in German viticulture, and their 2007 collection is consistently impressive. Both of the Ratzenbergers’ 2007 vintage Grosse Gewachse – in what has been fairly typical behavior – finished fermenting only in mid-August, and were immediately bottled with barely enough time to appear at the annual Berlin Presentation of Germany’s collective wines in this genreImported by Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608 9644