Herren the dog

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Liquefied vineyard dust, bronzed orange, molten amber. What firmness there was has been overtaken by lushness. Fully, fulsomely mature. (5/11)

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Very slightly edgier than the previous bottle, but still a copper-jacketed exercise in ambered snow globe, swirling with dust. I do like this wine in its blocky, steroidal bodybuilder way, but absolutely do not hold it any longer. (5/11)

Hairy wig

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Medium-density metal-jacketed pear and mineral dust. Fully mature and quite good. Dry as a dried-out bone in the desert. (1/11)

Herrenweg the owl

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Indice 1, which means dry. Now featuring: beautiful minerality, the kind that may not be unique to Alsace, but does mark it. What I mean here is the creamed-iron form, salty and free-electron at the surface, but dense and liquid at the core. Intense and vibrant. Perfectly mature. To this known ZH-detractor, Humbrecht does his best work at the extremes of dry and sweet, and it’s the rest that is too often soupy and leaden. (12/10)

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – More aged than the previous bottle, with the dusty and salt intact, but a lot of erosion from the foundation. It’s still nice, but other bottles have been better. (1/11)

Owl service

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Somewhere in here, there’s a finely-poised, iron-rich, balanced expression of riesling. Unfortunately, it’s layered in lush coverlets of velour and gravity. Not, as ZH’s wines go, at all bad. Quite nice, actually. But way too heavy for its inherent presence. (10/10)

Spiced Bs

Barmès Buecher 2004 Gewurztraminer Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – As with the rieslings from this site, Herrenweg gewürztraminer has a persistent problem with structure: it’s usually absent. Worse, the grape’s development is far too often stunted somewhere in the light peach and cashew range, leaving off all the exotic, developed aromas that give the grape its necessary character. Not here. This is a frankly brilliant wine, with intense, burnt-pork spice and blackened, almost Cajun-spiced minerality balanced by fiery acidity and only a very minor dollop of residual sugar (which, given the wine’s other qualities, I may even be mis-identifying). As hard as it is to imagine from this site, this wine has to be ageable. But even if it’s not, the pleasure of current consumption is plentiful. (9/07)

Hair N. Wegg

Barmès Buecher 2004 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – The Herrenweg de Turckheim isn’t my favorite site, especially for riesling, because the wines from there are far too often wishy-washy, lacking the nerve and precision that make riesling distinctive. There’s a soft, floral aspect to the wines that, typically, falls flat in the glass, or even under the influence of a stern gaze. Kudos to Barmès Buecher, then, for marrying the expected aromatics to a firmer structure than is typical. It’s not so much crisp or brittle as it is sandpapery, and so, texturally, this is somewhat unusual, but it may be the best possible mitigation of this site’s natural tendencies. Also of note: the wine is markedly dry, so those used to a dollop of sugar (or its more abrasive cousin, ponderous alcohol) may want to keep that in mind. (9/07)