2014 Riesling Heiligenstein Alte Reben

Willi Bründlmayer and his team took advantage of intermittently clear weather in the third week of October to harvest many of the estate’s top sites, and they finished up in the first days of November, save for some late-harvested attempts at nobly sweet wine, whose eventual bottled outcome had not yet been determined when last I visited. Skin contact was as usual part of the estate’s regimen in 2014, though applied with caution. While one expects excellence from Bründlmayer’s Rieslings, I was surprised and delighted that his trio of Heiligenstein bottlings proved so distinctively delicious in challenging 2014. (For reviews of some recent Bründlmayer reds and nobly sweet whites, consult my previous, otherwise vintage 2013-oriented report.)