Hisa Joannes Protner Renski Rizling, 100% Riesling, Slovenia
From Ned at Devenish:
Joannes Protner is a family winery in the hills of northern Slovenia very close to the border with Austria. They almost exclusively grow Riesling and are famous locally for their three beautiful steeply sloped (30-45 degrees) vineyards. The grapes are farmed organically, hand harvested, and then all destemmed and fermented in stainless steel tanks with native yeasts. The wine rests for 13 months before it's racked into large old oak casks where it ages on the lees for 8 months before bottling. The family does a coarse filtration and adds a small amount of sulfur. I'm super excited about this. This is an excellent value at a time when good dry German Rieslings are rarer and getting more expensive.
Aroma: sunny orange, sweet lemon, a little little hint of flint or gunsmoke (if that's what you want to call it), there's some clementine orange... It's a very sunny and fresh fruit forward aroma that combines stone fruit and ripe citrus.
Taste: wow! This is such a fantastic marriage of sunny expressive stone fruit and focused serious dry Riesling structure. The mid palate and finish are rich and there's a little bit of viscosity to the finish. There's a flavor on the mid palate like Thai basil. The fruit up front is ripe and concentrated orange and yellow peach.... there's some really ripe honeydew melon in there as well. But then salt and stony Riesling structure swoop back in to close the wine out!
