Zind-Humbrecht 1998 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Past it, which…even though this is from the ripeness-fetishizing house of ZH…is a bit of a surprise from what was a good year for riesling. There’s plenty of size, still, but it’s dried out and curling like old paper. (6/12)

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Liquefied vineyard dust, bronzed orange, molten amber. What firmness there was has been overtaken by lushness. Fully, fulsomely mature. (5/11)

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Very slightly edgier than the previous bottle, but still a copper-jacketed exercise in ambered snow globe, swirling with dust. I do like this wine in its blocky, steroidal bodybuilder way, but absolutely do not hold it any longer. (5/11)

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Medium-density metal-jacketed pear and mineral dust. Fully mature and quite good. Dry as a dried-out bone in the desert. (1/11)

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Indice 1, which means dry. Now featuring: beautiful minerality, the kind that may not be unique to Alsace, but does mark it. What I mean here is the creamed-iron form, salty and free-electron at the surface, but dense and liquid at the core. Intense and vibrant. Perfectly mature. To this known ZH-detractor, Humbrecht does his best work at the extremes of dry and sweet, and it’s the rest that is too often soupy and leaden. (12/10)

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – More aged than the previous bottle, with the dusty and salt intact, but a lot of erosion from the foundation. It’s still nice, but other bottles have been better. (1/11)

Zind-Humbrecht 2001 Riesling Herrenweg de Turckheim (Alsace) – Somewhere in here, there’s a finely-poised, iron-rich, balanced expression of riesling. Unfortunately, it’s layered in lush coverlets of velour and gravity. Not, as ZH’s wines go, at all bad. Quite nice, actually. But way too heavy for its inherent presence. (10/10)