The name refers to Bründlmayer’s trellising method, a Y-shaped system that looks as if the vine is throwing its arms up toward the heavens, says Willi. This system also more than doubles the leaf-surface exposed to sunlight and encourages quick drying of leaf and grape alike after a rain. Willi also wants to demonstrate you don’t need old vines to make great wine. But there’s more. Lyra is the wine of the sun, Says Willi, the brainchild. Whereas Alte Reben is the wine of the soil, the darker underground. You drink each wine with a different part of yourself. What a lovely thing to say. Empirically, I seem to be favoring this over the old-vines bottling in most of the recent vintages (and I ended up reversing my appraisal of the two 2006s after tasting them in bottle); this has really striking fragrance—expressive doesn’t begin to describe it; the palate is shimmering with diamond-gleam; an almost perfect mélange of cream and spice; it’s at the limit of power and penetration but finally rescued by its