Riesling HUGEL 2008

Totally dry with high natural acids. This famous grape celebrated in all the Rhine valley combines great elegance, finesse and minerality. Our most gastronomic wine for most fish and seafood dishes and many Alsace specialties.

Presentation

Quick View
It is the Pinot Noir of white wines! Riesling is our most demanding variety as it is also the latest ripening. Dry and elegant, it expresses its best on our steepest slopes with a most complex minerality.
The vintage
Climatic conditions were a carbon-copy of the excellent 2007 vintage. Budburst at the end of April was quite late, but May was warm and sunny so flowering began on 15th June and took more than a fortnight to complete.
July and August were particularly cool with hardly any rise in temperature, but in mid-September the Indian Summer arrived without a drop of rain. The sky stayed bright but temperatures were relatively cool.
As a result, the grapes ripened slowly but fully, perfectly healthy and with excellent acidity. In late October we harvested VT and SGN wines with historically high levels of sugar and acidity.
The 2008 Alsace vintage was already born great but may prove to be exceptional.
In the vineyard
Harvested exclusively by hand from clay and limestone vineyards in a dozen of the most favoured localities in and around Riquewihr.
Winemaking
The grapes are taken in small tubs to the presses, which are filled by gravity, without any pumping or other mechanical intervention.
After pressing, the must is decanted for a few hours, then fermented in temperature-controlled barrels or vats (at 18 to 24°C). The wine is racked just once, before natural clarification during the course of the winter. The following spring, the wine is lightly filtered just before bottling, and the bottles are then aged in our cellars until released for sale.
The whole production of this wine is closed with DIAM the cork without the risk of cork taint.
Presentation
Photos of bottles and labels, 3 definitions, max 300dpi
Varietal
Riesling : 100%
Specifications
Alcohol content : : 12.45° % vol.
Residual Sugar : : 3.9 g/l
Tartaric acidity : : 8.28 g/l
pH : : 3.09
Age of vines : : 30 years old
Yield : : 50 hl/ha hL/ha

Advice

Video
Tasting notes by Serge Dubs, World's Best Sommelier 1989
Predominantly green hints reveal its youth.

This dry, elegant, fresh young wine is lively, frank and refreshingly quaffable, ideal for all those who appreciate classic Riesling.

All this and more : it has an agreeable fruit character of green apple, white peach, citrus, grapefruit and spring blossom.

Enjoy it as an aperitif or to start a meal, with oysters, seafood, smoked fish, eel, pike or perch, and goats' cheese.

Serve it at 8°C now or in the next 2 years.
A fine textbook Alsace Riesling, true to type and well vinified.
24 July 2009