Light, thin golden garnet with a wide clear rim–almost orange just inside. Incredible moldy compost funk packed with horse-manure, dank humus and dirty-baby-diaper: all descriptors which enrage and confound the somm-generation and the rest of the 99%, but there it is. And it’s how Pinot should be. “Good Burgundy smelleth of shit,” someone far wiser than me wrote many decades ago and if you can’t face it, YOU’RE DRINKING THE WRONG PINOTS. #facts. With considerable air, the nose thins out to clear, bright strawberry, vegetal with tomato and celery, spicy with light grime and loam. LOVE these little teutonic babies–often pleasing far more than village-level burg and usually for less money.

And then you taste it. Oh, if only more wines commonly available in California at restaurants and bars could be like this. They’re easy to find at decent wine-shops, so don’t be shy. Thick, delicious berry climbs into the mouth, defying the light color in classic Pinot fashion. It thins–of sorts–immediately, as the Alpine acid and greenery takes grip. Bitterness grabs a foothold in the background, strengthening everything around it, causing a re-assessment of fruit as it fills the mouth with sharp shrubbery and dewy crispness. The tart cherry and pink-tinged raspberry are definitely *light* by California and Oregon standards, and Belle Glos fans will be thoroughly disgusted with this wine. Fortunately, impressing stupid people is not a goal of wines like this. Let them drown in their cloying bullshit–we’re happy over here with something so beautifully typicitous, astonishingly stark, and robust in all the right places. Please do yourself a favor and find these wines.

2017 WEINGUT RUDOLF FÜRST Spatburgunder ‘Tradition’ Germany 13.0

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