The 2020 Marienburg Raffes is pure, very intense and fresh on the crystalline nose, with popcorn, mocha and crushed slate aromas. Silky, lush and generous on the palate, this is a full-bodied, dense, intense and refined yet crystalline and saline, firmly structured and very sustainable Raffes with fine tannins and a long and promising finish. This is a highly complex dry Riesling that is not as soft or as feminine as the Felsterrasse but behaves like the Hermannsh?hle to the Dellchen. More aristocratic and shy rather than generous and tender. 12.5% stated alcohol. Natural cork. Tasted at the domaine in July 2022.

The 2020 Marienburg Raffes is pure, very intense and fresh on the crystalline nose, with popcorn, mocha and crushed slate aromas. Silky, lush and generous on the palate, this is a full-bodied, dense, intense and refined yet crystalline and saline, firmly structured and very sustainable Raffes with fine tannins and a long and promising finish. This is a highly complex dry Riesling that is not as soft or as feminine as the Felsterrasse but behaves like the Hermannsh?hle to the Dellchen. More aristocratic and shy rather than generous and tender. 12.5% stated alcohol. Natural cork. Tasted at the domaine in July 2022.

The 2019 Marienburg Raffes is very complex, refined and elegant on the open and intense nose that indicates perfectly ripe, dense and concentrated fruit with a fascinating flintiness of crushed rocks and salt. Round and lush on the palate, this is another full-bodied and intense yet pure and refined, enormously complex and elegant Riesling with enormous power, elegance and finesse. Highly impressive, the opulence of this terroir comes along with so much purity, finesse and balance and gives this unique umami texture in the sharp and precise world of Clemens Busch. The Raffes is not really dry but at least dry-styled and otherwise perfectly round. Tasted at the domain in September 2020.

The 2019 Marienburg Raffes is very complex, refined and elegant on the open and intense nose that indicates perfectly ripe, dense and concentrated fruit with a fascinating flintiness of crushed rocks and salt. Round and lush on the palate, this is another full-bodied and intense yet pure and refined, enormously complex and elegant Riesling with enormous power, elegance and finesse. Highly impressive, the opulence of this terroir comes along with so much purity, finesse and balance and gives this unique umami texture in the sharp and precise world of Clemens Busch. The Raffes is not really dry but at least dry-styled and otherwise perfectly round. Tasted at the domain in September 2020.

From a distinctive, stony parcel with ancient vines within the Falkenlay (in turn, of course, within the Marienburg), Busch’s 2008 Pundericher Marienburg Raffes Riesling offers pungently lemony, zesty, and cyanic fruit pit aromas, but a rich, oily-textured spiced peach and pineapple palate impression, reinforced by judicious yet in itself scarcely noticeable residual sugar. This is voluminous and generates a bit of finishing heat. It boasts undeniable high intensity as well as pronounced minerality, but of a rather adamant sort. I don’t envisage it achieving the level of interest or poise exhibited by either of this year’s other Falkenlay bottlings and I wonder whether several years out it might end up seeming more weighed down rather than more elegant. Clemens Busch – for more about whose impressive efforts in organically farming diverse sites the length of the long, steep Marienburg consult my reports in issues 179 and 185 – pushed many of his 2008s to extremes of dryness or sweetness. The majority of his dry-tasting wines – most of which did not finish fermenting until early summer – were rendered legally trocken (some of them offered as Grosse Gewachse and some to be released late), and while alcohol per se was seldom a problem this year, I found some of these wines austere, inelegant and charmless. (Dry wines here, incidentally, often go through malolactic transformation, but apparently due to such low pHs in 2008, only a single lot did so. There was however, reports Busch, extensive tartrate precipitation, which lowered the levels of tartaric acid, but automatically enhanced the ratio of green apply malic acidity.) This is not to say there aren’t many bottlings I found impressive and even beautiful in the present collection, especially – for those who don’t mind very prominent sweetness – the range of ennobled wines. Busch didn’t even launch his pre-harvest passes through the vineyards until nearly mid-October, and began serious harvesting only toward the end of that month, finishing in the third week of November, “but,” as he says, “it was a harvest that demanded a lot of time, because one day you could pick, and the next you had to wait due to inclement weather, and the botrytis often developed negatively”, demanding painstaking selection. Apropos the precariousness of Mosel wine culture, here is an amazing statistical anecdote Busch offered. The quality and character of his wines, he believes, is dependent on the high percentage of ancient vines trained in the traditional manner (a.k.a. Stockkultur) to a single stake, with two canes. A single, middle-aged woman who has no protegee is responsible for binding the canes on 80% of Busch’s roughly 25 acres of vines, a talent she acquired out of personal passion, and one that only a handful of even septuagenarian Moselaner any longer possess!Mosel Wine Merchant selections (various importers), Trier, Germany; fax 011 49 (0)651-14551 39; also imported by Ewald Moseler Selections, Portland OR tel. 888 274 4312