97 / 100 Robert Parker “From the first day of fermentation, I smelled this and got goose bumps,” says Klaus-Peter Keller of his 2009 Westhofener Abtserde Riesling Grosses Gewachs, and the same can be said of the finished wine, which – impressive as are those that preceded it in this year’s collection – plays in a different league. The dynamic complexity of elements for which one can find only mineral descriptors (and then very imperfect ones) is already astonishing: salt; chalk; alkali; shrimp shell reduction; iodine; and peat are already adumbrated on the nose and then spell-bindingly and intricately interwoven on a silken field with grapefruit, white peach, and Ranier cherry, nut oils and bitter-sweet floral perfume into a delectable, nearly demonic dance that leaves my mouth drooling and my tongue quivering helplessly in hopeful anticipation of the next sip. This transfixes and refreshes, yet greed still leaves me unsatisfied, and I fantasize about the Bishop of Worms – who once got first crack at the wine of Abtserde – denying me communion with this rarified and seemingly magical elixir. “The active lime content in this site is measurably enormous and unique among my vineyards,” notes Keller, convinced that its effects lie at the root of this Riesling’s animated complexity. A transparent exemplification of Keller’s Riesling ideals and of a great site, this will, I feel confident, continue to amaze for at least the next 15 years. (From vintage 2008, the name of the site was still disguised as a website address on labels of Keller wine from Abtserde by being written: Abts E.de. This year, that has been shortened to Abts E in a renewed attempt to avoid conflict with the legal proscription – in some regions treated as a technicality; in some selectively observed; in some rigorously enforced – on mentioning any of thousands of vineyard names that were officially eliminated by the 1971 Wine Law. I decided this wine is by now so justifiably well-known that we could simply write “Abtserde” for Wine Advocate purposes. Incidentally, Keller recently pushed back by more than 150 years – to 1380 – the first known reference to this “abbot’s plot.”) 193, The Wine Advocate
