Like any other true romance, a love of wine can slowly grow or it can come on like a thunderbolt. My hunch is that, for most people, a single bottle brings on that mighty moment, which turns into a lifetime affair with wine. There can even be two such moments — one for red wine, and one for white. My white wine thunderbolt hit on a cold February morning in 1973, the result of a wine column, long since discontinued in a local daily paper.

In that column, which extolled German riesling, Paul Zimmerman recalled how as a GI stationed in Germany in the 1960s, he and his buddies would sip those light, lithe wines during off-duty pleasure cruises on the Rhine River. Zimmerman counseled that the 1971 vintage, which was just then arriving in shops, was a rare marvel in a northerly region where the weather was more likely to treat vineyards with cruelty than benevolence.

Of several 1971 rieslings recommended by Zimmerman, I bought one called Ockfener Bockstein Kabinett, Dr. Fischer, at Macy’s — yes, you really once could buy wine at the “World’s Greatest Store.” My memory is that the wine cost $4. It rested overnight on the sill of my living room window facing the Hudson River. The window, which had yet to be replaced by an airtight version, leaked like a wind sieve. In the face of a frigid northwest wind, that spot was actually colder than the refrigerator. Impatient at having never experienced a German wine, I pulled the cork the next morning.

Instantly, a scent like spring flowers issued from the wine in that slender green bottle — which flower, I couldn’t then say. Years later, I came to know the delicate yet potent scent of friesa, and that seemed to come close. But some other aromatic element remained elusive. More years later, on an early spring night in a tiny village called Alonei Abba in the Galilean hills in Israel, I inhaled a floral scent as bewitching as that of friesa but which was animated by that missing overlay: a citrus element that had freshened the wine. I followed my nose to a nearby lemon tree covered with delicate white blossoms. Their scent, mingled with that of friesa, matched my memory of Dr. Fischer’s Ockfener Bockstein 1971.

A secondary pleasure of being introduced to a great new wine is that you also get to read about it. In checking out that Ockfener Bockstein in 1973, I’d have consulted an old version of “Frank Schoonmaker’s Encyclopedia of Wine,” the only wine reference book I then owned. Ockfen is a village on the Saar River, a tributary of the Moselle. Like the larger river, the Saar wends a twisty course through steep hillsides thin with soil but rich with blue-tinted slate. Where the steep slopes face south, vineyards are planted with lateripening riesling. Those of Ockfen comprise 250 acres rising 600 feet along their slope, of which 125 with the maximum favorable exposure are classified as Bockstein. The grapes are harvested by humans, although mountain goats would seem better suited to the job.

Among Saar vineyards, the justifiably famed Scharzhofberger, a few miles downriver, overshadows Ockfener Bockstein. But Scharzhofberger’s distinction is arguably due as much to the superb winemaking of its principal owner, Egon Müller, as to any innate superiority of the site. As the most recent edition of the Schoonmaker Encyclopedia, revised by the late Alexis Bespaloff, puts it, the wines of Ockfen in favorable years “are unsurpassed by those of any other German or French vineyard.” If a key parameter of a wine’s greatness is its persistence in memory, then Dr. Fischer’s bottle that I drank in 1973 was a great wine, even if it did cost only $4; and if ageability is another parameter of greatness, then German rieslings like this one also qualify on that count. Despite their scant alcohol, often hovering at 8% or even lower, these wines can, if well-stored, last for decades, thanks to a scintillating acidity that acts as a preservative.

Dr. Fischer’s wines have not excelled since his death some years back, but the flag of the Ockfener Bockstein vineyard is currently held high by a pair of wineries: Forstmeister Geltz-Zilliken and St. Urban-Hof. One morning last week, at the same window as before, I tasted St. Urban-Hof’s newly arrived Ockfener Bockstein Kabinett 2006 ($15 at Yorkshire Wines, 1646 First Ave., at 84th Street). This time the window was open, and the west wind was balmy. The lyric intensity of this wine was dialed down from how I remembered the now legendary 1971, but the song was the same. Then, last Saturday evening, I shared a bottle of the same winery ‘s Ockfener Bockstein Auslese from 2003 (a steal at $20 at Warehouse Wines, 735 Broadway at 8th Street). It was creamy-textured, rather than laser-beamed, as the 1971 had been — a reflection of the unnaturally torrid summer of 2003 as well as the ripeness of the Auslese category, two notches up from Kabinett, and one up from Spatlese. And yet, there was lift and lightness to the wine. It could have been mountain air suffused with high meadow flowers, yet underpinned by the steely acidity that is the signature of this region. On Sunday morning, I put my nose to the empty bottle and that inimitable scent was still there.

Ockfener Bockstein, even though your name is clunky, you stole my heart long ago, and it’s still yours.