”We began the harvest – the first time I have ever had this experience – with our 2009 Mittelheimer St. Nikolaus Riesling Erstes Gewachs,” explains Kuhn, “as we didnt want to have more than 13% alcohol or for the wine to get too plump.” Like its Landgeflecht counterpart, radically dry and bottled only at the end of August (around ten days before I tasted it) this smells of overripe pear and litchi; offers a subtly creamy and expansive palate; and finishes with fine persistence of ripe fruit, nuts, and stony undertone, but also an overtly lactic note that robs it of the sheer refreshment and primary juiciness conveyed by most of its stable mates. And while this isnt betraying its 13% in warmth or roughness, that level of alcohol might be another cause of diminished refreshment and elegance. Thanks to its stability, this bottling was spared filtration, which has paid dividends in terms of textural richness. I would look for 7-10 years of satisfaction. Peter Jakob Kuhn – for more about whose distinctive stylistic and agricultural aspirations consult my several earlier reports – had every reason to express delight in his 2009 collection, “but it didnt require enormous skill to make excellent wine this year,” he added self-effacingly and smilingly. Kuhn noted that he did have to warm the cellar to get a number of his lots to reach the desired degree of dryness. The dry wines as usual here underwent malo, but it was not a very profound transformation given the ripeness (and hence low malic acidity) of raw material; and most of the finished wines display plenty of sap and vivacity despite harboring low measurable acidity. Noting that “If you have to wait for botrytis to come, the berries eventually become sweet but harbor less finesse; early harvest always results in the best nobly sweet wines,” Kuhn suggests that such optimal botrytis harvest was possible to only a very limited extent in 2009 and explains his variable degree of success.Imported by Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608 9644; also imported by Domaine Select Wine Estates, New York, NY; tel. (212) 279 0799