Fricke’s 2008 Lorcher Riesling Spatlese trocken represents the collection point for fruit not used in one of her top wines. Extremely citric and saline, it offers bright refreshment, levity, and lip-smacking finishing savor, if at the price of a sheer brightness that may have some wine lovers donning sunglasses or taking a pass. What allay the effect of the high acidity in this relatively spare and uncompromising Riesling of 12% alcohol are its sheer sense of underlying stuffing and its generous sense of primary juiciness. Eva Fricke works full-time with Johannes Leitz in Rudesheim. “I started out with a Rudesheimer Berg Rottland idea,” she says, but then she looked downstream and around the great northerly curve in the Rhine to Lorch and Lorchhausen, “and I saw these soils, these old vines, and these exposures and I though ‘that’s just got to turn out well.’” She now owns as well as rents tiny plots in those villages. The results (based on my assessment of these 2008s – Fricke in fact began, with two wines, in 2006) are impressive if tending toward austerity, and reflect the unique character of Riesling from these steep slate sites, which – meant as absolutely no criticism – is more Mittelrhein- than Rheingau-like. I should note that Fricke says her experience thus far indicates that her wines need half a year to truly recover from bottling, which these 2008s were not even close to having received when I tasted them last September.Importer: Farm Wine Imports, Sausalito, CA; tel. (415) 331-4906