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Slate On The Razor's Edge
2013 Lauer Senior
Clarity in the Saar
For anyone interested in mineral wines with a razor's edge cut, Lauer's 2013 Senior is something not to be missed.
Lauer's Senior is one of our favorite bottles, period.
We love the wine for it precision, its value and the way it evolves into something beautifully complex with mid-term aging. It's a bottle that we buy in quantity every vintage.
The 2013 Senior is an electric, riveting edition of the wine, full of slate-y mineral drive. As always, it's bright, transparent and super-energetic. Lauer focuses a large portion of his efforts on "dry tasting" Rieslings. With 13.4 grams of residual sugar and 7.4 grams of acidity, the 2013 Senior comes off as being incredibly well balanced and indeed dry tasting.
Florian Lauer doesn't pull any punches with his wines. There's no effort to pander to tastes or simplify things. "Riesling for advanced learners'' is his motto. Lauer's wines are dead serious, captivatingly so. However, when it comes to his Senior it's impossible not have a deep fondness for them. There's such a beautiful honesty to Lauer's Senior, such a steely minerality.
A large part of the explanation of how Senior combines such mineral intensity with detail and precision has to be the vines' age. The always informative Lars Carlberg writes, "Senior comes from 15 different plots totaling 1 ha in the section of the Kupp hillside known as Wald and Neuanlage... sourced from vines planted from 1910 to 1920," These sites are in a cooler section of Kupp and you definitely feel the density of the old (often ungrafted) vines along with the nervous tension of the cool site.
Lauer's Senior is one of the most authentic, personality-filled Rieslings. It has a beautiful clarity and simplicity in poise and presentation. As always, our advice is to stock up.
To order, reply to offers@crushwineco.com or call the store at (212) 980-9463.
Joe Salamone
Wine Buyer
Crush Wine & Spirits