Domaine Albert Boxler

The Grand Cru Sommerberg’s late harvested Riesling from a unicorn producer… what a rare treat. This is a deliciously dangerous VT, still in its infancy at 2020—open now at your peril! Tasting this in the summer of 2025 I am encountering nose of ripe pineapple, mango, habanero, and sweet corn, all these notes a bit withholding when the wine is just opened and too cold. I’m scolding myself for not waiting longer to taste this, and yet how can you be mad when you’re in the presence of such energizing fruit. The wine clearly has a Bacchic chorus inside of it, and that’s not a claim I make loosely. Tasting notes feel blasphemous. If you had to put a reference point on it the wine’s home base is perfectly-ripe nectarine. Fascinatingly, the wine is not as sweet as you might think, and the acid is not daunting but gentle and gorgeous, drawing the wine upward like a marionette. The byword in this wine is harmony. This wine’s biggest problem at this age is that it is so moreish that you throw it back faster than you’d like, haha. Its wildly promising potential is still secreted away inside its youthful fruit profile. Of all the vinous infanticides I’ve committed, this one was the least painful though, because the wine is just an insanely delicious treat, regardless of all the snuffed-out possibilities of future maturation. The more patient cellar-keeper will collect a dizzying reward on their discipline if they can hold onto this wine for 10-20 years. And if you have a 2020 baby or an anniversary in 2020, do yourself a favour and lay some of these down for your future celebrations!