A truly heady floral perfume of lily and gardenia greets the nose from Gies-Duppel’s 2007 Birkweiler Kastanienbusch Riesling Auslese. Quince and pear are here, too, and the combination of creaminess and delicacy is striking. There is a certain confectionary aspect to this – in no small part due to its 133 grams of residual sugar – but if seems to waft and float in a finish of pure floral and pit fruit essences, in no way dragged down to earth by its sheer sweetness. One could truly drink this as a dessert wine today, although I would prefer to forget it for a decade, then expect at least a second full decade of reward. (The oily-rich, more obviously honeyed 2006 is comparably impressive, despite it’s representing the first Riesling Auslese of Volker Giess’s career.)Volker Gies took over his family’s domaine in 1999, and is relentlessly and successfully pursuing quality and site-specificity while offering (at least, based on ex-cellar pricing) some of the finest values I have tasted in German wine over the past several years. Some potentially exciting new vineyard sites have recently been cleared for planting it is clear that, as impressive as these wines are, there will be much more excitement up ahead. Although it had been in the bottle 18 months when I tasted it last September, Duppel’s well-concentrated but rather awkwardly woody, rough 2005 Pinot Noir represented at that time his current offering. But red wines represented the only disappointment of any sort at this address, and even here there is promise. Like his more famous neighbors Rebholz and Wehrheim, Giess renders a range of site-specific Pinot Blancs.Importer: Tartaglione Fine Wines, San Francisco, CA; tel. (415) 216-3356