Alsatian Air Conditioning
2008 Trimbach Riesling "Reserve"
This is Riesling at its freshest, most cutting, most cooling.
Jean Trimbach says that the 2008 vintage is the best since 1990, and possibly in the last 100 years.
This, even after the insane success of 2007. He’s not alone in his praise: Considered word on the wine street is that 2008 in Alsace gets an A++.
This is the first parcel of Trimbach’s 2008 Riesling Reserve in the United States – just in time for summer.
This wine is electric, a jolt of blue-cool acidity that is simply glacial. One staff member confessed to having desperately downed one of our sample bottles last week, turning to this for its cooling power as her apartment A/C did more huffing than puffing.
Today’s pricing goes down to just under $20 a bottle on the case, making this nearly as fundamental as suncreen, beach blankets and flip-flops. (At today's pricing, this case of Riesling costs the same as a rush of precisely 8,812 BTUs washing over you. How did we calculate this? Click here for our resident calculus genius' chart.)
That makes your case of wine for pairing with cold fried chicken, sweet corn chowder, sunshine and rooftops exactly $239.40. Order today, and when temps screech into the 90s, you can be cold sippin'.
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If 2007 was a classicist’s vintage in Alsace, yielding Rieslings of unadulterated, shattering rocks, 2008 one-ups that chiseled minerality and pert acidity by coating it all with pure, really bright fruit extract that lends depth and an outrageous sense of harmony. Dare we compare it to 2001 in the Mosel? Yes. The acids, specifically, give the wine that same kind of precision and energy - that clarity - that is only making the 2001 Mosels drink better and better as they grow up.
To be totally honest, this kind of glowing acidity doesn’t come regularly in Alsace, one of the southernmost and warmest points for world-class Riesling in the Northern hemisphere. But Trimbach regularly flies in the face of what one (especially Mosel-Saar-Ruwer fan) might expect of Alsatian Riesling, with a style that regularly emphasizes cut and tension over Alsace’s typically exuberant fruit, flowers or spice.
"Purity and cleanness, always," Hubert Trimbach emphasized to Andrew Jefford, author of The New France. In 2008, that purity aligned with the cool but sunny days to bring clean, very fresh and startlingly zippy fruit straight to the forefront. Riesling’s varietal character comes through eloquently, with minerals toned by intense lemon pith aspects and lots of stonefruit and citrus.
In all fairness, you're not going to mistake this bottling for the Clos Ste. Hune - it's a simpler wine, for sure. But it's still undeniably classy, sporting the archetypal Trimbach signature in a sleeker, more refreshing, more gulpable form.
Oh yeah, and you can also get approximately eight bottles of Riesling Reserve for the price of one Clos Ste. Hune!
The one problem with the stellar 2008 vintage? There’s not much of it. Yields were tiny, even half their normal average in some cases, which furthermore means that Europe will get the first pickings, and finding substantial quantity in the U.S. is likely to be a long shot. We're the only ones with this in the nation at this point, and for all we know, this may actually be the only shipment to the States.
Again, we’ve been graced by Jean Trimbach’s generosity. And though we’ve taken as much of the Riesling Reserve as we could in the hopes that this’ll squelch our thirst through summer, the ravenous response to our recent Trimbach offerings has shown us that this is an estate with a thirsty following.
To order, please email us at offers@crushwineco.com or call the store at (212) 980-9463.
Robert Schagrin
Managing Partner
Crush Wine & Spirits
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Trimbach arrives next week!
NET | No further discount