Joh. Jos. Prum Bernkasteler Badstube Riesling Auslese Goldkapsel 2010 750ml

Katharina Prum seeks to assure me that a 2010 Bernkasteler Badstube Auslese gold capsule represents her family’s first-ever Badstube bottling of that designation. As with the corresponding Zeltinger, she says “this was simply too ripe to call it merely ‘Auslese.’” There is brown spice pungency here more pronouncedly than one expects to encounter in Mosel Riesling which – when allied to chewy apple and pear skin as well as lemon and lime zest – engenders enormous invigoration in a wine whose brightly juicy citricity and sense of mineral impingement as it is serve for vibratory, near-electric intensity and finishing persistence. This doesn’t approach the refinement, intricacy, or seductive allure of the corresponding Zeltinger Sonnenuhr, but taken on its own terms represents a memorable achievement almost sure to remain robust for close to a half century. Katharina Prum says she and her father performed some de-acidification on their eventual generic Kabinett bottling as wine, but otherwise employed only sparingly light double-salt must de-acidification, insisting that late harvesting was the essential measure to be taken this year against high acidity. (And, as usual, most of the wines were bottled in high summer, relatively late when compared with those of nearly all their Middle Mosel neighbors.) It’s not so much that measurable acidity dropped significantly in the second half of October, opined Prum, but that the character of the acidity changed in immeasurable ways. Other than the aforementioned generic bottling, concentration was deemed simply too high this year for any of an already small crop to be rendered as Kabinett. And indeed, only the two most prominent sites were captured in Spatlese format; all else is Auslese and above. Prum notes that levels of residual sugar are seldom significantly higher this year than in other recent vintages, with the result that the wines generally tend to taste a bit drier. “Above and beyond” (as it were) those wines I report on (or whose existence I at least mention) below, there is material from Wehlener Sonnenuhr expected to inform long gold capsule Auslese, Beerenauslese, and Trockenbeerenauslese and be released in future years. (Veteran readers of my reports will know by now that while there are often multiple eponymous Prum bottlings, the family is loathe to disclose the A.P. #s of wines they serve in tastings, numbers that might be required to disambiguate between lots which they insist that there will only ever be very slight difference. In 2010, the crop is was so small that there are few alternate bottlings.)