Today's offer represents one of Germany's most curious, and most singular wines.
This is a bottle that we have been obsessed with for years. It is so intensely soulful, agile, and mysterious.
Durst's 2016 Portugieser "P" is simply a haunting wine and with only around 600 liters made every vintage, there's never much to go around.
 |
With four years of development, the wine is integrated and seamless. The nose is soaring and intensely perfumed with both fruit and flower. There are notes of strawberry, mint, and rose petals. The palate is brisk and penetrating with saturating minerality and soil tones that are framed by fine tannins. While the wine drinks beautifully now, it clearly has 5-10+ years of positive development, maybe more (thus the 3-pack pricing).
If you know anything about Portugieser, you know it as a grape that grows abundantly and can have quite a dark color. Thus, it's been used for decades to bolster the color of some rather anemic reds. It's been a filler.
However, old-vine Portugieser is a very different thing. Durst's two rows of ungrafted Portugieser vines were planted in 1906. As far as anyone can prove, this is the oldest Portugieser vineyard in the world.
This curious micro-parcel, which has survived for more than a century, is situated in the border region between Germany's Pfalz and the Rheinhessen, only a few kilometers away from where Klaus Peter Keller has redefined what German wine can be, using the same limestone soils.
The potential for greatness here is well established. Durst's bottling is a most curious and soulful part of this greatness, but great it is. Do not miss.
To order, email offers@crushwineco.com or call the store at (212) 980-9463.
Joe Salamone
Wine Buyer
Crush Wine & Spirits
