Litchi, musk melon, lily, and rose petal sweetly and alluringly scent Bott’s 2008 Gewurztraminer Sonnenglanz; whose well-concentrated but harmonious and buoyant mid-palate comes as a relief after the almost unremitting and at times inharmonious tension of so many Bott-Geyl wines of this vintage. Nearly 50 grams of residual sugar threaten to but don’t quite swamp the lovely persistence of liquid floral perfume and the buoyancy in the finish, while nips of pepper, brown spices, and green herbs add counterpoint and further complexity. Here is a Bott-Geyl 2008 cru you can relish already in its youth, but which I suspect will hold well for at least the next 15 years, in the course of which the overt sweetness will eventually taper off at least a bit. “For me it was not a classic year for V.T. or S.G.N.,” says Jean-Christophe Bott of 2009. “There was very little botrytis, and when we started picking it was with the aim to make the best possible normal range. I found most of the Gewurztraminer very aromatic and fruity, but soft and lacking the depth of their sites; too much on the varietal side, so I preferred to mostly declassify, and also because in 2008 we had a great vintage whose wines really taste of their sites.” My judgment on 2008 is qualified. Detached tartness and decidedly fungal overtones suggest that in some instances fruit had to be harvested lest it succumb to botrytis. A measure of that fungal advance is that the nobly sweet wines in the present collection are enormously high in sugar and quite strongly marked by botrytis, yet represent the product of picking entire blocks rather than bunch-selection.Various importers, including Beaune Imports, Berkeley, CA; tel. (510) 559 1040 and Winebow, Montvale, NJ; tel. (201) 445-0620