At 7.5% alcohol and more than 60 grams of residual sugar, Zilliken’s 2008 Saarburger Rausch Riesling Kabinett is in the mold long familiar for this bottling and by no means tastes excessively sweet. Lime, orange, grapefruit, and cherry dominate this luscious, light Riesling of rapier length, enticing invigoration, and consummate refreshment, and one whose satiny texture and sense of saline, stony minerality become more evident after you give it some time to open-up and warm-up. Hanno Zilliken and his daughter Dorothee – who is playing an every-increasing role here – now have a spacious and sophisticated new gravity-fed cuverie and reception area behind the family house and next to the deep, old barrel cellar, replacing the cramped facilities in which three generations have worked ever since the family’s original above-ground structure and everything around it were flattened by Allied bombs during the Second World War. Like a number of his neighbors, Zilliken – who compares 2008 with 1988 – began picking already in mid-October, but set a leisurely pace and did not finish for a month. “Time in cask was really critical for the evolution of the acids,” he says, and one perceives that particularly in his successful dry bottlings of the vintage. As my detailed notes explain, the longstanding traditional trio of Kabinetts at this address – one trocken from the Rausch and one each in identically high residual sugar style from the Bockstein and Rausch – has been expanded this year into a range at different levels of residual sugar. Importer: Rudi Wiest, Cellars International, Carlsbad, CA 800 596 9463