2000 Riesling Muenchberg Grand Cru

Andre Ostertag describes the 1999 growing season as classic, with very little botrytis. "The wines are a bit aromatically inexpressive today; we need to judge them by their intensity and structure," he told me. "In 2000, there was a lot of good and bad rot, sometimes in the same parcels, and strict selection was necessary," added Ostertag. "We had a bizarre vegetative cycle in 2000: May and June were as hot as August usually is, and July was like November. The vintage has both a cold and a hot character, and it was very complicated for the vines. Today one sees all the elements of very good wines, but the 2000s are mostly not yet in harmony." Further complicating my efforts to assess these wines at this early stage was the fact that a number of them were still fermenting and thus were sweeter than they will eventually be in bottle.