Bright gold-tinged straw. Enticing subtle nose offers scents of apple, nectarine, lemon jelly and herbs, plus an element of flinty, almost smoky minerality. Rich and dense on the palate, with lemony acidity (5.7 g/l total acidity expressed in tartaric, with a pH of 3.4) and noteworthy salinity lifting the youthful but already highly complex flavors of stone fruits, baking spices, minerals and lemon curd. A hint of noble bitterness emerges on the back that is very Rangen. Finishes long and classically dry (actually 12.9 g/l residual sugar, but the wine has such an acid edge that you won’t notice the sugar at all) and very light on its feet (13.4% alcohol by volume). This multilayered, highly refined wine promises to develop gloriously but is currently hard as nails. In fact, in 2013, the cooler climate and later flowering didn’t allow for extreme ripeness of the Pinot Gris grapes, so this wine is drier than usual (and devoid of noble rot). Olivier Humbrecht likes this wine a lot, but jokingly complains that he had such a small crop (hail resulted in a poor budbreak and flowering, with the 20 hectoliters per hectare production the third lowest yield in the estate’s history for this wine) that he couldn’t make as much wine as he would have liked.
Ian d'Agata, June 2016