Terry Theise dips into the vast range of Weingut Künstler in Hochheim, and comes away impressed anew by Gunter Künstler’s ability to express the many different terroirs of the Rheingau region.

Everyone should have interesting friends. Of course we love our friends, and to us our friends are always interesting. But I refer to a specific sort of friend, the one with whom you make such vibrant conversation that many days later the ideas are still crashing around in your head. It’s My Dinner With André in real life. If we have even one single friend like that, we are blessed and fortunate.

I’ve spent much of the last week tasting through a case of wine Gunter Künstler was kind enough to send me, so that I could stay reasonably current with his work. Of course, his is an expansive winery, and I couldn’t taste everything—I couldn’t really even taste much. (I missed most of his reds, many of his Rieslings, along with his Chardonnays, Grüner Veltliner, sparkling wines, and sundry others.)

But what I did taste were wines I not only liked, admired, and enjoyed; they were wines that echoed and pealed, so that I didn’t want to stop thinking about them—couldn’t stop, actually. A Künstler Riesling is the paradigm of an interesting friend.

Having added land several years ago, Künstler’s Rieslings are a cross section of possibility for the Rheingau. From the mineral-soaked earthiness of Hochheim (and its near-neighbors) to the swollen richness of the central Rheingau (Erbach, Hattenheim) to the lacy clarity of the Rüdesheimer Berg Schlossberg with its slate and quartzite soils, this estate pivots so gracefully among those terroirs that you can’t really pin it down. Nor need you. 

If there’s a through line running among these variations of type, it isn’t easily described but it’s easily discernible in aromas and textures. Künstler’s wines are modern, ie, clean and clear, usually a little spritzy, very much on the dry side of dry—but what they are not is aggressively acidic, overtly “perfumey,” or marked by any sense of having been “formed” or engineered. Their elegance seems to derive from a kind of candor, that the sites should speak clearly, and that is how you know whose wines they are.

Among the whites, the “1er crus” were from the 2022 vintage while the elite “GG” series were ‘21s. Many commentators have lauded 2021 to the skies. And many of the wines are exciting, and a few of them are great. Yet the vintage has an extreme enough personality that I have a rather more nuanced view than others I have read.

2022 Künstler Spätburgunder “Tradition” Trocken

A mélange of sites in Hochheim, this seems to be the estate-level wine. Aromas are sweet and roasty, and the palate is glossy and balanced. I was highly curious how these would be, after tasting all the reds from Baum-Barth (a new estate in Ingelheim) last week. In contrast these present less seamlessly; you can taste the fit-and-finish here, and the surface texture is less matte than the Ingelheimers. There’s also the innate earthiness of Hochheim to consider.

I’ve always liked this wine, and it remains appealing. Its exterior is perhaps more buffed and polished; it feels shaped and formed, and nothing wrong with that. The Baum-Barth wines had an ease of being, as though nothing could shape them because they were already ideal. Here, we have a wine that’s bright and spicy and eager to express itself. I like and admire it, and I also miss the tender umami depths of last week’s wines, which I appear to have been quite spoiled by.

Four days have passed and the nearly-full bottle stood undisturbed in my (now) 51º cellar. I’ve brought it up to room temp and was curious—would it seem less plausible and better knitted than the first time? The answer is, mostly yes. I also observe that it is grumpy to complain about a wine that seems tangibly shaped-and-formed. We respect those things. And I like the deliberate finish, with its earth-depth and tomato leaf edge. It’s like clove and duck breast in fluid form.

2019 Künstler Assmannshausen Höllenberg GG ++                                    

Spätburgunder only appears on the back label. The steep slatey vineyard downstream from Rüdesheim, after the river has turned to the northwest, has been famous for its reds for many years, though that fame is only recently justified—by wines like this.

A delicate, marrowy fragrance pulls you in. The wine is in a way “modern” in its clarity and brilliance of texture, but the depth and sweetness of fruit are encompassing and convincing. It is spiffy, yes, but it’s also gorgeous. It has a civilized wildness on the mid-palate; rose hips, tomato water, and curiously those Bisquit de Reims cookies you get everywhere in Champagne. I’m going to venture further afield than most readers will be able to follow, but there’s a quality of fruit here that immediately reminded me of Theresa Breuer’s Rieslings from the Rauenthaler Nonnenberg, as though they were fraternal twins who could read each others’ minds.

It also reminds me of the sweet side of Gevrey, the one we often forget is there, typified by Charmes-Chambertin. I do not exaggerate when saying it has the force and imprint of a grand cru, though its fruit is so exquisite it’s almost dainty. But vintage ’19 shows its sun-soaked-wheat generosity and its herbal-doughy mid palate, and the wine is anything but evanescent. And saying that, we have to account for a quality of fruit that seems to hover, as though it were vaporized and was floating just above the glass. People sometimes talk of the ethereal force of great Burgundy, and I see it here.

Finally, the wine clings on the finish as though it would perish if it ever disappeared. The wine is masterly, and tenderly splendid. If the phrase “buoyantly deep” isn’t too great an oxymoron, this wine shows the paradox that always heralds greatness, and greatness is well within its reach. Chapeau, Mr. Künstler; you have unearthed a gem.

Upon re-tasting I ventured outside into the howling gale of a rare April nor’easter, and the wine revealed its finesse of diction and its articulation of nuance. It showed its oak, too, but nothing more overt than an especially deft Crianza Rioja.

2022 Künstler Hochheimer Stielweg Riesling Alte Reben +                                 

An elegantly mineral bouquet also offers fir and iron in an introverted, even broody form.

No brooding on the palate! The wine enters with a 21-gun salute, loaded with physiological “sweetness” and with redcurranty herbs and a mixture of spices that made me think of galangal. Combined with the gob-stuffing earthiness of Hochheim, we have quite some dry Riesling juju going on.

I mean, it’s hardy a secret that Künstler shares the summit with few if any other Rheingau growers, but really this wine is crazy-good and entirely euphoric. Along with all the spice and earth and mineral complexity there’s just a borealis shimmer that rides incandescently along the palate, a pure serene dryness that has nothing remotely strict about it, so that it takes colossal will power to even spit it.

(And may I remind you that we’re not yet even at the GG level?)

These wines have never had the acclaim they deserve in the American market. Whatever “reasons” there may be for it, they have zero to do with the wines, which are unfathomably good, consistently so, and presented with a more modest grace than is sometimes the case among the grands seigneurs of the Rheingau.

It also keeps getting better. On my third sampling it’s all nettles and gorse and a newly persistent citricity of tangerine.

Okay, here is pure wildness, act-1: it would be stunning to taste this next to the Steinsetz Grüner Veltliner from Gobelsburg, going back several vintages, because both wines have a radish stiffness yet also a lavish juiciness, and flavors seem to zoom upward like a high-speed elevator in a tall office tower. The wine isn’t the least bit elegant, but it’s a thrill to drink.

(Pure wildness acts 2 and 3 will arrive soon, as these wines kept insisting on identifying their cognates in Austria.)

2022 Künstler Hochheimer Kirchenstück Im Stein ++ 

Riesling appears only on the back label.

This loam-dominant vineyard is one of the two best in Hochheim. Gunter Künstler would admonish me that there are three, the third being Hölle, but I see that one as a satellite grand cru and not quite among the very best.

Compared to the Stielweg it is more angular and corrugated—and it has a half percent less alc—but the craggy chiseled complexity here is simply categorical, albeit the wine is less ethereal than its big brother the GG—which is on the tasting table as I write. You could call this wine “chewy” and you could call it peppery if you knew the floral nature of the Tasmanian variety. It’s like a rock wall with plenty of hand-holds for climbers. It also has the “sweetness” of cardamom. But lining up its (many) flavors is maybe ineffectual, because the meta-truth of this wine is someplace else.

It is deep, deep in the zone-of-confusion for Riesling, the place where people think the variety is “fruity” or god help us, “sweet.” A wine such as this one is at the apex of the varietal essence, the basic truth of these wines. When grown in the land that suits them best, they are essentially rocky; everything else plays atop that rough and forbidding complexity. And the genius of this greatest of all grapes is how amazingly good they taste, built on such a solid frame.

There are ways in which this isn’t quite as impressive as the Stielweg. It doesn’t have quite the length. It doesn’t have the yin-yang of minerality and iridescent shimmer. What it has, though, is the thing you can never reduce, can never go deeper-than, because this is as deep as it goes. It is the taste of this vineyard’s terroir. Is it relatively ungainly, shambling? I think that it is. But the essential thing by which it is endowed is an inscrutable, indifferent depth. Like it or not; it doesn’t care. It just gnarls away with its is-ness, and if you don’t come to the party, the party happens without you.

It gains in delicacy over the days; the party’s winding down and the few remaining people are having one of those searching late-night conversations all of them will remember happily, and for a long time.

2022 Künstler Hochheimer Domdechaney Riesling Trocken ++                                                                                                                                             

This is the most unreadable of the Rheingau grands crus. That may be why I love it so much. It behaves as if it were banished from Deidesheim. It feels oblique to the other Rheingau crus. (That wasn’t always the case, but in simpler times they knew what was what better than we do now.)

In many ways you can see it here. This wine is silkier than the Kirchenstück. The minerality is more pixilated; the wine is saltier. A hyssop and carraway element is gaudier. What piddling few grams of RS seem more visible, though this could be a palate error. A curious overtone of melon arrives. There’s a spearminty finish. Seriously, it’s a stupid-complex wine.

There’s something of the grainy legume-y complexity of the Schoenenbourg grand cru in Alsace, along with the miso and meyer lemon thing of the Pfalz. If “Rheingau” entails a sort of stately elegance, a perfectly fitted suit completed by the perfect ascot, well forget that shit. This wine’s profundity is like a smooth rockslide of salt and scree. The doughy underpinnings are reminiscent of the Wachau’s Achleitenthough in a considerably sleeker form.

How does dry Riesling improve on this? Damned if I know. Let’s keep tasting.

Second tasting—it’s more assertively spicy, and even brash from the Jancis glass. It remains a master class in terroir. It trades personalities with the Kirchenstück, growing more clamorous while its neighbor grows more refined.

2021 Künstler Hochheim Kirchenstück GG ++ 

Riesling appears on the back label. That label is affixed to a stupid heavy bottle all the more egregious coming from a “Fair ‘n Green” member estate. All the GGs are in this dreadful bottle. THIS NEEDS TO STOP.

Bearing in mind we have a different vintage now, we also have the ethereal overtones one hopes to see from the GG class, unless the site is such as to preclude such things. But not here; the way this wine smells is—divine.

The sublime is irreducible to the components that added up to it. I can cite those components here, most of them at least. There’s the “floating” nature of wine that received perfect and sensitive cask aging, and the umami that results from it. There’s a subtle honey, like fresh cut acacia. There’s the brisk smelling-salts sting of ’21, hissing beautifully at all the sweetness. There’s a surprising coda of length in which the very guts of the cru are there to be tasted. There’s a finish both searching and tangibly minty. You can line them all up and see what sum there may be.

Only there isn’t one. There’s a totality that has nothing to do with the things you thought would produce it. A grand cru is like music or poetry; it is inhabited by a spirit—you could even call it a ghost—that says when it is present even if you don’t think you speak its language. There’s always a moment—you know it immediately. 

This is a wine full of wonders and with many facets of greatness, and I am blown away by it. And being “blown away” I also find myself wondering whether the wine is too emphatic. That sushi-knife cut—what Karen MacNeil calls the “stiletto” effect—gets in the path of the chime, and for me a great wine wants you to listen to the bells.

I can easily imagine other tasters hearing such thoughts and thinking “That man is fucking crazy.” Maybe I fucking am. I haven’t joined the chorus of uniform praise for 2021, because while its best wines are exciting as fireworks, its not-best wines can be shrill and some of its best wines can be, let’s say, obviously and blatantly grandiose. This wine isn’t one of them, I hasten to add, and while I can easily recognize each way this wine is wonderful—and it is—it is more of an explanation and less of an incantation. But seriously, what nonsense is this? How can a sensible man have a single caveat about a wine this beautiful? I shouldn’t … I don’t, really. But the smell of the empty glass is the first time I feel the impulse to let go, to surrender. That aroma is otherworldly.

I feel the same with subsequent tasting. This is sensational wine by any standards, even my crypto-mystic ones. It’s probably inane of me to look for some para-sensual shimmer as the marker of greatness. Yet I do. On the other hand, wear strong tight socks when you drink this, because it will set about to knock them off.

2021 Künstler Kostheim Weiss Erd GG ++

The back label shows Riesling, and also spells “Weiss Erd” Weiß Erd, as if the GG-font had no way to write “ß”

Perhaps the most improbable GG in the Rheingau, an exceptionally warm microclimate along with limestony marl, I have thought this to be among the “lesser” GGs—but wow, this wine smells like a million bucks, like some astonishing hybrid of Champagne and Nahe Riesling. The Jancis glass reveals elements of hyssop and fennel, and once this hits the palate—look out.

Now we’ve added white tea and white pepper to the mix. The wine  blasts away in every possible key; it’s ridiculously lively let also has the brightest umami; it has stinging precision yet also a sort of taut lusciousness; it has a twitchy energy but also a sort of iridescent serenity. When I opened the sample case I was at first disappointed he didn’t send the Pfaffenberg GG, but I am crazy glad he sent this! I can’t imagine a better wine was ever made from this cru. It’s like the angel of a very frisky puppy.

When the ‘21s justify their reputations they taste like this. It’s a high-wire act; they can be too brash, too crudely “intense” and too acid-driven, but just when I start wondering what the fuss is about, a wine like this comes along, and demonstrates The. Fuss. 

Either there are a measly few grams of RS or else the physio-sweetness is unduly expressive. What (little) the wine might give away in elegance, it compensates with sheer vividness and a psychedelically visible intricacy. I could imagine it as a wine Hans-Günter Schwarz made in his heyday.

That’s a lot of words for a wine whose ideal “tasting note” probably should be—“Fucking hell, am I tripping?”

I have a little daydream of Gunter and his cellarmaster going through the cellar tasting these wines just after fermentation, looking at each other slack-jawed, each of them thinking Good lord, what have we got here?

2021 Künstler Rüdesheim Berg Rottland GG ++

Again Riesling on the back label, and again (like all the GGs) a lamentably heavy bottle.

Rottland can brood, and after the fireworks of the Weiß Erd this wine arrives as an introvert. Experience tells me this will be deceptive, because Rottland is often soconcentrated it seems to implode. What it reminds me of—and this would be a wicked side-by-side tasting, is the Ried Lamm Grüner Veltliners, which have a similarly implosive translucence. I wouldn’t fuss at you if you held up Ried Achleitenas a more apt comparison.

The question is, what will the big broody beast make of the ’21 vintage? Rottland is so often a magma of Riesling, will it know what to do with the ’21 brilliance? At first the wine feels swollen, as is typical. It has some jalapeño heat (but just 13% alc) and a certain amount of analog mist, not opaque, but burying its flavors deep within its chest. As it aerates it grows saltier, like those black lava salts, and it also has aspects of a dried morel powder I have in my pantry. (FarWestFungi is the excellent source, if you’re curious.)

In fact this is typically Rottland, likely to be underrated at this stage, hard to see into its mass, clearly profound but also abstruse. It’s a prototype of the give-no-quarter Rheingau personality. You don’t approach it in search of charm; you come to it wanting to see how wine can be when it isn’t cracking jokes or looking sexy. But a wine as deep as this justifies the term “unfathomable,” because you can just see, just barely see, the great profundity waiting—more patiently than you do -  just below the surface.

I babied this wine along over many days, because I wondered whether it would yield an inch with time.  I’ve known Rottland for decades, notwithstanding its many nooks and microclimates. My second look was a day after the first. It hadn’t changed. It is also not the first time I suspected the GG rules actually constricted a wine like this. I don’t know what (if any) RS it has, but 6-9 grams more would have made a truly enormous difference.

Question of taste, of course! And churlish to fuss over what could have been. I need to remember, when tasting a series of wines as outstanding as these, how easy it is to find nits to pick just to demonstrate I haven’t squandered my entire critical faculty.  Still, the wine doesn’t feel quite comfortable in the starchy suit of 2021.

2021 Künstler Rüdesheim Berg Schlossberg GG ++ 

Riesling of course.

The steepest site in the Rheingau is also among the very best, and belongs in a small family of sites with slate in this region—slate and Taunus quartzite in this instance.

The fragrance is heavenly; there’s no other word for it. And oh, as I write these words I am learning that one of the great Deacons of slate is lying in a hospital in Bernkastel, struggling to breathe. And I sit here, soaked in slate, contemplating time and distance. Fingers crossed for Alfred Merkelbach.

There’s something of a miracle occurring here. We’ve thought of Künstler associated with the gob-filling, mineral drenched earthiness of Hochheim, yet here he is working with its utter antonym, this lacy, fastidiously detailed wine, flavors like needlepoint, energy like a kite flapping in a stiff breeze, entirely precise, amazingly transparent. Its clarity is positively euphoric, as though a math calculation was explained so clearly that you caught it at last.

From the Jancis glass it’s better and also less good. There’s a steely green note like a subtle celeriac that the Spiegelau doesn’t show, but Ms. Jancis also explicates the carpentry of this wine in  such ingenious detail it’s like looking at the Eifel Tower—so gigantic, so filigree.

That said, on second exposure this glass subtracts more than it adds. You can trade down to a smaller tulip and encourage the wine’s juiciness, always a good idea with ‘21s.

Speaking of our friend 2021, it is certainly an exciting vintage, especially for tasters excited by bracing acid-driven clarity. I like it better as I move south, in general. I perceive the virtues other commentators are kvelling over. They aren’t wrong; these are the virtues they happen to thrill to, and 2021 at its best is a thrilling vintage. But I must sound a note of caution.

Forget the dubious ways these high acid years often age. I won’t be around long enough to see who “wins” that debate. I want to consider this excellent wine, and ask the following question: When you have a wine that excels in fastidiously drawn flavors, and that shows a strong “vertical” structure, and that always has a certain lift and buoyancy, what happens in a year when all the wines tend that way? You might be underlining something that was already underlined. A wine like Berg Schlossberg is perhaps most impressive in years where its freshness is atypical, and therefore welcome. In a bracing vintage we risk exaggerating the virtues of wines like this one. The stinging finish is typical of the things that concern me. Yet the amazing flavors that arise from these—in the tertiary finish—are incomparable and show the vintage at its most persuasive.

These are just thoughts, theories, considerations; don’t take them too seriously. Especially don’t let them mitigate the beauty of this wine, which really is amazing. 

2021 Künstler Marcobrunn GG +                                                                                                                                                                                                              

So renowned that it does without the village of Erbach on the front label. Obviously Riesling.

Marcobrunn, like Bernkasteler Doktor, grew famous in an earlier time, and while the wines were (or could be) honestly great, they were also overpriced based on supply and demand. Me being a humble country wine merchant, I tasted very few Marcobrunns. When I did it was clear why they earned their reputation, and also clear why so many wines failed to honor it. We were all happy when Gunter Künstler was able to make wine from this hallowed land. I wrote Gunter that “the Rheingau angels are happy” and he said he was touched, and that he’d have his hands full with the added work.

In essence Erbach is vanilla and meyer lemon and one of the pale honeys—lemon blossom, say. You see it in Siegelsberg and to some extent in Schlossberg—which is a little earthier, plus you never quite know with a monocru whether the proprietor is really doing justice to it. Marcobrunn takes the pliant nature of its neighbor Siegelsberg and adds a surprising solidity. You taste it here, in this wine’s thumping seriousness.

I have an image of a café bringing out all the just-baked cakes for the afternoon trade, and the place smells so amazing you’re going to smash your diet to bits and eat a bunch of damn cake. All the cake spices are here. I don’t need to name them.

Then the wine hits the palate huge and hesitant, someplace between “I shall glow like the King I am” and “Will I remember all the words?”

I’m going to say something ludicrous. I’d love to see a Marcobrunn, in whatever fancy bottle is available, without the GG designation and its not-invariably-useful strictures, bottled with something like 16-20 g/l of residual sugar, in effect “feinherb” but actually the way such wines used to be made when they earned the reputation we’re paying for now. I want to hear the message “We’re going to bottle this wine to be as beautiful as it can be, and the question of sugar is for beginners.”

I say this ridiculous thing because, for all the lofty profundity of this GG, I can taste how it might have been even better. And I also can taste how I might have been wrong. After all, opacity is the sidekick of profundity, and it’s just reasonable to admit my position may be erroneous. The wine could justify itself and I look like a fool. But—I don’t think so. Sometimes the whole “GG” thing is a boat that needs to be rocked, and this may be one of those times.

It does well with air and it prefers the articulations of the Jancis glass. But overall it is somewhat obdurate. It needs time—of course it “needs time.” But it’s already handicapped by an ideology that doesn’t fit this particular wine. But in fairness, there are vintages of Bründlmayer’s Alte Reben Heiligenstein that can seem mulish upon release, only to reveal their beauty over the years. This could be one such wine. I don’t think so, but it could. I’ve been mistaken before. I’ve tasted it four tiimes now, and its story isn’t finished being told.

That said, I stand by my conviction that this fine wine could have been majestic if it were liberated from the GG strait jacket. My opinion, yes, and I stand by it.

2022 Künstler Alvarinho Trocken

And yes, this is the order in which I tasted—Marcobunn GG, then this chap.

Please don’t mistake my meaning. This is the more successful wine, insofar as it does what it sets out to do, perfectly. It’s not just everything it should be; it is everything it could be. It is a delightful glass of wine and all you want to do is drink it. A bit less fruity and a bit more “wooly” than the deliriously addictive 2020, it challenges the idea that a “modest” wine can never be equivalent to a “great” wine (or a wine with affectations of greatness), and when it meets that challenge—easily—it confers a dignity for which these so-called simple wines have always had to struggle to attain. It may not be “dignified” to be able to smell this three feet from the glass—but it’s fun.

This could seem like I’m slamming the Marcobrunn, or even the entire genre of the grands crus, but reader, you know better. The Marcobrunn is profound, I admire it justly, it is a different order of being, one I respect because I believe in the elite. I run the risk of annoying my friend Gunter—who will see these words—but I need to ask: How do we compare a Significant Wine that might have been better, to an Everyday Wine that’s as good as it could possibly be? (Yup, it’s an essay question, and yup, there will be a quiz.)

This wine is highly herbal, less overtly “mineral” than the original Galician, more clement you could say. If it calls to mind a Weinviertel DAC, I won’t take issue. There’s a lot to be said for a wine that just works, and a lot of ways to say it.

2022 Sauvignon Blanc “Kalkstein” Trocken +              

From the Hochheim site Herrnberg, a rare outcrop of limestone in this area. The wine is ripe (13.5% alc) but the fragrance is subtle and fine. (An aside; the ’21, which I found objectionably vegetal, sold faster than any previous vintage ex-cellar at the estate. Shows what a hot shot I am.)

Regardless, I really like this wine, because it is more a question of soil than of variety. (He also has a Chardonnay from this land, which I now wish he had included.) I never really warmed to (what I call) some of the stinky Sancerres, but I always liked (what I call) the polite Pouilly Fumés.  This wine is bold, but not at all vulgar. Considering its ripeness, it acts like certain Alto-Adige Sauv-Blancs that taste fulfilled but not gross, and not overripe. Still, I don’t think I’d glug this wine—13.5% is no small business—but I really appreciate how carefully the cassis notes are expressed, almost as though it were a rather deliberate Scheurebe, and to my way of thinking, this wine is no less aristocratic than any of the Rieslings. Their ceiling is much higher, obviously, but a very smart vintner made this wine, and lavished his very smart attention on even this wine …

… and as it swells and billows in the glass, it grows more generously expressive yet it never loses its essential and detailed finesse. “Finesse” and Sauvignon Blanc do not always ride in the same car, so this is no trivial thing. It is a lovely and valuable coda to the great declamations of the Rieslings. I was stirred by this “modest” wine, even moved, sometimes amazed, and which now eases me out back into the world with a lovely anecdote, not weighty but engaging, and I want to share it.

The post The wines of Gunter Künstler and the value of interesting friends appeared first on World Of Fine Wine.

The most poignant thing about a Merkelbach wine is the innocence with which it arrives. It has no agenda, it doesn’t care to impress you; it has no ego, and it really has no affect you can discern. Even when a given wine is full of energy, it shows up placid and unguarded. The wines are napped in silence and calm, though individual wines may be precise and articulate. It makes me think of footsteps in newly fallen snow, where no feet have stepped before you. They are unique among all the wines I know, and this signifies much more than my opinion of any particular one of them.

These will very likely be the last ‘21s I taste from Mosel producers whom I represented. My hesitancy about the vintage is established by now, and I wonder how these will be. Last night I opened a bottle of 2005 Würzgarten Spätlese; it looked all of two–to-three years old (in a vintage with a lot of premox) and tasted like a dream of Riesling Eden.

To refresh your memories, the estate is being operated by Selbach now—vineyards and cellar both—and Johannes is careful to maintain the Merkelbach style, which entails doing things quite differently than they’re done in his own estate. That choice is pragmatic and sensible, but not only; It is also neighborly, even affectionate, and most certainly respectful. In any case it stirs me, just as Rolf and Alfred Merkelbach’s wines have always stirred me.

Each of the wines in this flight of eight underwent an evolution in the glass, and I often felt as though I had arrived in a different country from the one I set off from. Rather than alter my notes though, I’m leaving them as they were, because these transits are salient; any discussion of the wines is denuded without them.

And so we begin.

2021 Merkelbach Riesling Trocken

The color is a shade darker than that 2005 was last night! The fragrance is what it should be, with an Ürzig angularity and a Kinheim apple-skin chew. (Can a fragrance have “chew?” Evidently so.) The palate could be called “sleek” if one approved of it, “thin” if one wasn’t sure, and “scrawny” if there isn’t enough fruit for our hypothetical “one.” There is marked length and linger for such a light wine, but the matter of fruit isn’t settled to my own satisfaction.

It’s a thirst-quencher, but so are a lot of other white wines that have plenty of fruit, and this wine for its several positive attributes is just too ascetic. As you know, dry German Rieslings have improved dramatically in the last 15-20 years, but that doesn’t mean any old wine can succeed in this style.

That said, many ‘21s are in an in-between phase wherein they have shed their baby-fruit (very early) and haven’t replaced it with the tertiary flavors that usually follow seamlessly. I can’t be sure that this wine is stingy; it might just be mute at the moment. We’ll see how it fares over the days.

It is rather different the next day. For one thing, its residual sugar (below the legal limit of 9g/l obviously) is noticeable, and the wine is much less lean. Today I’d stop at “tart” and push “steely” away. It maintains the angular texture of a chaptalized wine (which it clearly is) but it’s far less forbidding now. One won’t write verses in its honor, but neither will one dismiss it out of hand. It was wise to have given it a day to get over the grumps.

2021 Merkelbach Kinheimer Rosenberg Riesling Spätlese Trocken

Again more yellow than I expected. It smells pretty. The wine was excellent in the 2020 vintage. And it a leap forward from the previous wine here. The texture is more elegant and integrated; the interplay of slate and fruit is visible and pleasing, and while the wine is hardly chummy it offers much vim and distinctiveness and many things to enjoy.

The gestalt is snappy, but within the outlines is a certain…not “richness” exactly, but a certain substance, and a certain rounding of the edges, so that this very dry wine displays a furtive kind of grace.

Rosenberg can show a musk-melon element sometimes, along with a smokiness as if you were burning herbs. This was dramatically present on day two, and utterly invisible upon opening. It shows an intricate minerality from the Jancis glass. The deliberate finish is as much quince as apple. It has a basmati sort of starchiness, and it resolves into a lovely dry Riesling that some would call cerebral—and nothing the matter with that. The finish takes the mid palate and stretches it into the next county …

2021 Merkelbach Kinheimer Rosenberg Riesling Kabinett                 +

It smells like it should, this vineyard in this vintage with this ripeness. It’s on the dry side, as Merkelbach’s wines are (we’ll leave the outlier vintage 2018 out of this discussion …) and modest in the most positive way. What it is, is a charming little wine. It isn’t slight, but neither is it completed; it would need more middle and more visible ripeness.

As it is it slips down easily and forgettably. It isn’t overly acidic and it finishes balanced and dry after a somewhat misaligned beginning—common to many ‘21s that needed more sweetness to mitigate their acids but which would then have been too sweet. But this unassuming little wine knits together admirably over the palate, and it’s one of the ‘21s that can fool you; it grows in the glass and shows a swell of almost ferrous urgestein character—a kind of dark-slate—that really overtakes the external notes of the wine and leaves you in quite a different place from where you started.

The more I sip it the more it impresses me, and the more I have to surmount my own expectations. I assume this site will give lovely, even euphoric wines, but I don’t expect to see the brooding, expressionistic minerality I’m seeing here. My first impression was wrong, which is why any reviewer is a fool to “score” a wine based on a first-impression. I’m no stranger to foolishness, but that’s one I escaped from.

If I tasted it blind I’d think Saar more than Mosel. The tip off would be grapefruit and quince. I’d guess Wawerner Herrenberg, and then all my friends would laugh at me. I’d have to make all new friends, again.

This wine was fruitier on day two, less insistently ferrous and “dark.” It shows wintergreen today, for reasons I struggle to explain.

2021 Merkelbach Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Kabinett                  +

This is amazingly good and really entirely perfect. Each piece is where it should be, every element of balance and interplay is precise and easeful, and it is pure Würzgarten. If you were leading a seminar on Mosel Grands Crus you could—should!—use this as the very paradigm for this site.

It is also a great triumph for the ’21 Mosel vintage, a wine with none of the issues that plague the crop. Acidity, while brisk, is balanced. Sweetness is as good as invisible. Finish is maybe a little bracing, but within bounds. And the overall effect is seamless and complex.

It’s passionately introverted, and will shrink into itself if there are lots of clamorous wines around it. Could you see it accurately in a “big tasting?” I can’t fathom how. But put a little gray around it, and watch as its own gaudy colors shine through.

Yet as much as this is one of those “no need to say much” wines (as it explains itself so well), I have an image-tone. If you cook meat sous-vide you probably do a last-minute sear to caramelize the surface, and if you think of that—the melting purity of the interior with the snappy crunch of the exterior—you’ll understand something of the physical tactile life of a wine like this one.

2022 Merkelbach Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Kabinett

Alcohol is a percent higher (9% versus 8%) than the ’21. The aromas are more exotic, somewhere between yeasty and cilantro, even beery.

This follows on to the palate, which is of an entirely different structure, shape and contour than the ’21. Acids are more discreet, mid-palate is softer, and while the wine is articulate, it isn’t precise. There’s also more apple and less sassafrass then in the ’21. The wines share a perfect and seamless balance of sweetness with….well, everything else.

It’s also more peppery. It has the exotic florals of Tasmanian pepper. It’s a scoosh less good than the ’21 but it’s also the easier drink. It rewards your attention but doesn’t compel it. You have to wait 5-10 minutes for it to shed those “curious” opening notes, but when it does it offers another sort of portrait of Würzgarten, softer but no less classic.

But is it “classic?” It starts off encased in strangeness, and while it does eventually emerge, it’s as if a vintner set about to make a “natural” wine and abandoned it half way through. Because that Pet-Natty thing is more stubborn than I like. If you spent all day tasting ‘22s you’d probably grow numb to it after awhile, but I’m in transit from those crisply bracing ‘21s, so it stands out.

In contrast to its brethren, this wine was better yesterday, suggesting that it might be best to drink these to the bottom when you broach them.

2021 Merkelbach Kinheimer Rosenberg Riesling Spätlese

This shows the color I thought I’d find, which is to say, no color.

It smells great, pure Rosenberg, pure Merkelbach. The palate, with its 7.5% alc, arrives less sweet than that would suggest, but does the opposite of many German Rieslings—it finishes sweeter than it began. This is by no means objectionable, but the wine is rather creamier than the ’21 norm. Still, who says they all have to be angular?

But again, like all of these, it shape-shifts in the glass and grows less “pretty” and more serious. I really mean this: If you actually pay attention to these wines you will find your initial impressions are almost always inaccurate. This is a much better wine than it first appeared to be, and while it is overtly “rich” in the ’21 context it is also possessed of a certain sternness—if you wait for that to emerge. 

And now, having broken it down and considered its facets and tonalities, the conclusion I can’t resist is simple: The wine is perfect. Not that other wines couldn’t be better; thousands of them can be. Not that you or I couldn’t imagine how this wine might be even better, because I’ll bet we could. But why would we want to? Really, why! This is exactly the way this wine should be, and if we think we need to demand even more, well….maybe we’re missing the point?

2021 Merkelbach Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Kabinett Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Spätlese                 ++

Having tasted these wines through and through in every vintage since 1983, I know a certain moment when I sniff it: Yes, here it is. 

God knows it didn’t appear in every vintage. There were a few dogs over the years. But when it did appear you knew all was right with the world. Like now, like here.

All you can say it this is rampant Würzgarten. It is all here. Each of its many flavors, expressed with perfect articulation; each of the facets of truly classic Spätlese, expressed with perfect balance; all of the buoyancy and yet all of the paradoxical grip, that’s all here too.

I played a role in making Merkalbach “famous,” and these days they’re a stop on most reviewers’ tours. It’s a little sad to see the wines get “scores” but that’s the way of the world. These wines are and have always been different from the usual competitive matrix. They are das ding an sich, primordial, they refer to a self-ness so deep it renders the business of “evaluating” them seem like the conceits of dullards and knaves.

How is this wine? Just speak its name, slowly. That’s how it is.

2022 Merkelbach Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Spätlese                   +

A similar overture to that of the ’22 Kabinett, but this time the doubtful notes are sloughed off more promptly. 

I find this an “important” wine. It’s almost adamantly exotic, sternly herbal, none too sweet. And forget about “spices;” this is like a Ricola herb garden with the resinous echos of 25 different herbs—most prominently hyssop, anise, basil, bee balm, herb salts, savory….

In its way it’s a masterpiece of terroir, a superb wine in any vintage, and a deep joy to encounter.

I think the Merkalbachs would have made three or four different wines from this material. You’d have the strawberry-fruity one, the kiwi-sassafrass one, the stiffly slatey one, and a couple other this-and-that wines you could blend together if you wanted to. The most distinctive wines would have been bottled alone, which I encouraged. I may be wrong but my guess is, Selbachs are simply too busy during harvest to baby these little lots along—or they combine them later, before bottling. Johannes, I hope, will rebuke me, because I’m a naïve dreamer and he’ll restore the Urglück and the Lang Pichter just as soon as there’s a harvest that’s clement and easy.

It would make me happy, but I’m too greedy for that happiness, considering the gifts I have already been given. 

If you are somebody who holds these wines in special affection, then I hold you in special affection, because there aren’t very many of us, and that in turn is because we have learned how to ask for the sweetest things wine can give us. I promise you this: any day in which you think about Rolf and Alfred Merkelbach with gratefulness is a day you are shielded from dismay or despair.

It’s a pleasure to be reminded of these things, but in some ways it’s an even greater (if disquieting) pleasure to remember how easy it is to be wrong about a wine. This isn’t self-evident, because anyone in the reviewing business has to be confident that her judgments are correct and reliable. Usually, they are. But speed is her enemy, and tasting too fast can lead to over-confidence. I shudder to think I might have published notes based on the first pour of any of these wines. Yet obviously, if everyone tasted as slowly and repeatedly as I do, the whole machinery of wine criticism would grind to a halt. That may be a circle that cannot be squared, in which case I can only remind you of the benefits of being wrong about a wine. Each time one of them leads you in an unpredictable direction, you are granted a rare and precious opportunity.

I often look at people walking their dogs, and wince to see them yanking the dog around and away from the many things he finds fascinating. And I am greatly heartened when I see someone letting the dog lead the way and move at his own pace, pausing when he wants to pause, reading the news of his world. We’d all do well to taste wine that way (and I’d love to watch reviewers stop every few meters to pee on a pertinent shrub), though the world won’t let us. More’s the pity.

The post The 2021 Merkelbach Collection: Napped in silence and calm appeared first on World Of Fine Wine.

In the second part of his review of the latest releases from Müller-Catoir, Terry Theise tastes the Pfalz estate’s portfolio of white wines, which, alongside some of the region’s finest Rieslings, also includes Muscats, Scheurebes, and Rieslaners that Theise “would not hesitate to call great.”

Müller-Catoir Riesling  2021 glug-glug-glug

Trocken goes without saying. Damnably. I had a bespoke feinherb bottling of this that barely surmounted the crucial price-point for by-the-glass—with today’s Dollar it would be comfortably below it—and thus it was discontinued after my “retirement.” Pity, because it was as singular and perfect a Riesling as you could ever taste.

<sigh….> I tried.

Still, I always liked the original dry version, and now I like it again. I mean, really like it. It’s more fun than all the Mel Brooks movies put together. It is the purest expression of the riotous herbal and citric notes of ’21 and yet for all its zing, it’s also limpid and at-ease, and almost casually delicious, like it came naturally, like it was no effort in the least to just blast this perfection out to all of us. It’s the kind of wine you taste and think Why would anyone drink anything but this?

When ’21 is good it offers a totally unlikely conciliation of zip and flow, tension and calm. Now in its first year it’s not just drinky, it’s stupid-drinky, and I see no reason not to dive into these wines right now, and roll around the floor together giggling.

I’m leaning toward saying that the ’21s warrant young drinking. What???? All that acidity, and you don’t want to keep them? Well I really do wonder, and part of why I wonder is that four days in, this giddy beast is starting to nip with puppy teeth, and what I think’s happening is, that sharpness was huddling beneath a quilt of irresistible baby-fruit, and as that facet retreats the “expressive” acids start “expressing,” and what transpires in four days in the bottle is often a harbinger of what’ll occur with several years in the cellar. Thus my sacrilege. If you drink them young, you’ll enjoy the giddiest possible primary fruit, and if you wait you will squander that gift on a risk that the wines will develop according to an Idea you cherish—but it’s only that: An idea.

Müller-Catoir Haardt Riesling 2021

Trocken of course. Same alc as the M-C, interestingly. We have some attitude now. More demanding, less appealing, but we have to get serious some time. And here we’re introduced to an umami of the fields—if that doesn’t sound too precious. I mean sun-heated grass and herbs, cut hay, weedy greens. Even a small voice of gooseberry peeps up.

You choose. You won’t find anything more than hints of apples or stone fruits here, but you’ll find flavors you’ll like especially if you like high-toned Grüner Veltliners. I like it, up to the slightly astringent finish, yet I also appreciate that this winery offers the opportunity to cavil in tiny ways, because everything is smart and snappy and wickedly articulate. My recoil (such as it is) from the sardonic bite on the finish could be something another taster relishes. It’s a privilege to be persnickety when all the wines are this good. And saying that—this isn’t my favorite.

Müller-Catoir Neustadt “V” Riesling 2021    ++

Tall bottle, alc 13%, Trocken naturally. An overt aroma reminding me of the old clone-90 fragrance—mandarins and pink grapefruit and tilting toward Scheurebe. But oh; this palate……

The reputation of 2021 will be made from wines like this. The question is to what degree these qualities are perishable, and this I do not know. But I can tell you that what’s in my glass right now is bloody superb. It’s still a little “wild,” and it has less fruit than it has spices and savories and almost a Nahe accent. Acidity could be seen as pointed until it’s buffered by a ludicrous saltiness. And for a winery as cerebral as this one can seem, this wine is awfully sexy, especially right from the freshly open bottle.

Müller-Catoir Bürgergarten Riesling 2021   +

This isn’t the “GG” but rather the Erste Lage (1er Cru) single site wine, Trocken, alc 13%. It shows the classic fragrance from the site, mandarins, bergamot, sautéed apple sprinkled with cinnamon—those kinds of things. Especially silky and refined in ’21.

It’s the melody the Mussbach played on an alto-sax, now played on a soprano sax—even the same notes in the same register, just more piping now. We have a lemony citricity, but early-season Meyer lemons, before they grow too rich. And the wine is generally more reticent—yet I wonder what’s being held in reserve? Sometimes wines like this one can seem refined beyond all sensual existence, though I haven’t had the chance to review them when they’re 5-10 years old.

Again, it’s ludicrous to quibble when faced with such beauty. Much of what I love about Dönnhoff’s Leistenberg wines is evident here. I’m looking for the comfort that lives beneath the thrill.  But perhaps my quest for consolation is misdirected. What grows clear is, this remarkable family of wines -22 of them in all—will speak differently as they are sampled differently, and I’ll spend the next 7-10 days twisting the sequences to catch myself up in errors I ought not to have made.

Müller-Catoir Bürgergarten “Im Breumel” GG 2021  ++

Pretentious heavy bottle—as always especially egregious when a certified organic estate uses it. And—the word “Riesling” only occurs in teensy print on the side label.

The first time I had a Riesling from this then-new acquisition was back in 2002, when the only way to distinguish it was the AP # 2134. I sometimes wonder whether this estate would have greater “status” if they had five “GGs” instead of just this one.

It’s a clos in the heart of the Bürgergarten, yet as the years have gone by—and now especially—it distances itself ever more from the “parent” site. In effect it has none of the ingratiating elements of Bürgergarten, replacing them with an ancient-tasting kind of solidity, and what one might call a rectitude of minerality. There’s also a high-cheekboned chiseled sort of deacon-reserve here, a Shaker probity. It entails no small courage—or else just sang froid—to present your “GG” without it trying to “impress” the tasters who do their rankings early on.

Perhaps Franzen, for all his geniality, has a mystic streak where his wines are concerned, and if I might paraphrase him, if the ethereal is effective, the earthbound will follow. Not to mention, ’21 is hardly a come-hither sort of vintage. And really not to mention, it’s fairly straightforward finding paths among the fruits and flowers, but it’s another matter to pick ones way among the stones. And Breumel, bless its stringent heart, is a warren of stones. And ginger. And celeriac.

I’m tasting it for the fourth time, and have been consistently impressed. Yet it didn’t “show” well one evening when we drank a flight of the dry Rieslings in the kitchen while dinner was cooking. I was actually baffled, because I’d assumed the stature of this wine would prevail under any circumstances. It doesn’t change my opinion of the wine, but it does affect my feelings about it. Our pedagogical friend seems happiest when being carefully attended to.

Well I’m willing. Will there be a quiz?

Müller-Catoir Mussbach Riesling Kabinett 2021  +

It’s good that the estate still bottles a Kabinett and a Spätlese each vintage, for the clientele who prefer them or who simply have flexible taste. At times I have thought these wines over-sweet, but that could be because the dry wines, the many dry wines, are so dry that an ordinary sweetness seems blatant.

This is colder than my other samples—the cellar isn’t quite cold enough (in mid-November….alas) to leave everything out of the fridge  -  and this hasn’t warmed up enough. But: It’s a sterling example of the genre, and it isn’t too sweet, and it smells gorgeous, and if it is a little too rich, that can be blamed on climate change. It’s an apple tart in a glass, both the baked fruit and the buttery puff-pastry crust—and it ends day-1 of tasting with a fine send-off.

Müller-Catoir Mandelgarten Riesling Spätlese 2021

Another heavy bottle. There are too many of these.

And an Erste Lage, a sandy vineyard giving Rieslings at their least “fruity” and most…one could say wild, almost feral. And what can sometimes feel too austere in a dry form can really sing when sweet. As it does here. I wouldn’t have minded a bit less sweetness, but how much would that have taken from the riotously vivid aromas? (Nor is the residual sugar high at all, at least on paper.)

It’s all too easy to second guess the mind of the cellarmaster, tasting the bottled wine in my kitchen almost a year later. I’m sure the ’21 acids felt like a warning—don’t spare the horses. Acid will swallow sweetness. People who buy these wines sometimes want to wait many years to drink them, and a paucity of sugar will tire them too soon. But the more I drank this, the better balanced it seemed.

We have a zingy sort of Spätlese without the usual citrics or malics or stone fruits but with something resembling shrub made from every herb in your meadow.

Müller-Catoir Herrenletten Weissburgunder 2021

I’m happy they sent this. In the interests of time, when I used to visit on buying trips, I often bypassed the Pinots (Blanc & Gris) just to make time for everything else. So, this Erste Lage wine is something new to me.

Many German estates offer Pinot Blanc to provide a dry wine that’s both lower in acidity and more neutral than Riesling, and these are hugely successful there. So what will Mr. Franzen make of this variety, our hero of the N-th degree of specificity?

In fact I like the wine quite well. It has the approachability of PB alongside the detail of M-C wines. It’s not the way I happen to like to drink Pinot Blanc, but that’s just my subjective preference. This is explicitly, emphatically varietal—if I were teaching varieties to students I’d use this to demonstrate “Pinot Blanc”  (before anything was done to it), and it’s certainly pleasurable to drink. Maybe more than just pleasurable. I need to get out of my own way sometimes….

Müller-Catoir Herzog Weissburgunder 2021

As the above, this is another Erste Lage. It has a different structure, more tensile, more filaments and twigs and spices. It made me think of the Boxler PB from the Brand, perhaps the best in Alsace.

A curious wine. The things I like I really like; the minerality, the tension, the embedded richness, even the slightly-too-much treble. What perplexes me is the brevity, in the face of all that energy. It sings a clamorous song, and is exhausted. But not before it flings a phenolic bite at you as it’s taking leave. In the Jancis glass it asserts a Riesling-like stoniness, which at first is quite impressive, until it crashes into incoherence. You won’t notice this if you drink it with food.

However! I did not taste the two PB together, but rather one per day. I’ll retaste them as a duo and see what can be gleaned.

This I did two times, and each time I liked them even more. I used my “rounder” Spiegelau white-wine stem and found the wines singing. 

Müller-Catoir Muskateller 2021  +

I want to do my first run-through in two flights, so 12 wines per day—more than my usual tempo. This came near the end of day-1, as a reward for my enterprise (!). That’s because Catoir Muscat has been a totem-wine for me for the last thirty years. I think it is among the Great Wines of the world, not because it is exalted but because its very lack of (what we’d call) profundity is itself profound.

I wonder if Martin, tasting these wines over all the 20 vintages he has stewarded, ever thinks “Who could ever have imagined I’d be so good with this variety??” I have never quite found a Muscat equivalent to these wonders from Müller-Catoir. The Goldert from Zind-Humbrecht is the north-star for the variety, yet I doubt even that wine can approach this one in detail, psychedelic brilliance, and improbable varietal nuance. This is simply one of the very greatest not-great wines in the world!

Müller-Catoir Haardt Muskateller  2021   ++

To clarify (if needed) the so-called “Muskateller” is in fact the Gelber Muskateller, the yellow-Muscat or small-berried Muscat or, to reduce it to its essence, the effing difficult Muscat. My friends and I call it “the good one,” or would, if I had any friends who shared my ridiculous crush on this variety.

In effect this is the “GG” of Muscat, wherein its assertive varietality is (to some degree) subsumed into a general vinosity that has a boggling quality for the unwary taster. Here I must wonder….has any vintage of ZH Goldert been better than this? I love that wine, buy it whenever I can find it, order it in restaurants even if it doesn’tgo with my food, yet this is at least its equal. 

Why? Iron, volcanic (black) salts, Thai basil, not to mention a virtually incomprehensible complexity of herbs—plus wild lavender—not to mention a subtle but discernible minerality, all leading to a cogently great example of this admittedly emphatic variety, which has never been nobler than it is here. The final mystery is the fragrance of peach in the empty glass, which let’s face it is completely batshit crazy.

I cannot fathom the poverty of my world if it didn’t contain wines like these.

Müller-Catoir Scheurebe 2021   +

A high-tones neon buzz of Scheu aromas, especially sage, savory and pineapple. It smells like it wants you to faint into it.

This is ridiculously good quality for a wine of this modesty. It’s deft, amazingly complex, both expressive and courteous, crazily herbal and citric and even mineral. Yes the finish is a little shrill—’21 is not without its claws—but its discretion in the face of its absurd animation is almost without compare, as if the wine insists “Don’t mind me….” while it scatters the craziest most intricate flavors in its wake.

Müller-Catoir Haardt Scheurebe 2021   ++

Village-quality now.

Look, it’s well known that I love Scheurebe; I loved it at first sip, at a long since vanished winery in Wachenheim back in 1978. Because I adore it, I don’t mind when it’s emphatic. It shows, at such times, a sort of noble profanity. A dally in the profane is good for a person, I think, and so I indulge both myself and the wines.

Sometimes, though, a Scheurebe can also show a delicacy and considerateness that seems to have no equivalent. You’d look to Sauvignon Blanc, and I often like Sauvignon Blanc (and sometimes love it) but SB speaks a wild kind of tongue, while Scheurebe will sometimes recite in a Riesling timbre.

I started to write “like this one…” but drew up, because this actually feints toward Grüner Veltliner in its slimmer more herbal dialects. (An aside: There are hack growers in Austria who’ve been known to deploy an enzyme that makes their GV taste like Scheurebe, and so the sorry circle is complete.) In any case 2021 is kind to Scheurebe, giving it a dialectic and discretion it doesn’t always show, while preserving its ornery varietality and also encouraging a refined tenderness that does make a guy think of Riesling. Only the acid bite of so many ‘21s obtrudes upon the eerie and tender affection of this almost-great beauty.

Müller-Catoir Haardt Sauvignon Blanc 2021

Apropos of which…..

It’s one of the very few times I’ve thought this winery took a false step. SB is trendy, and while I wouldn’t ever accuse them of pandering, they do not need SB when they already make the world’s best Scheurebe. Or?

Bearing in mind, again, that ’21 seems to have been hostile to SB in Germany, thisaroma is really uncouth on the heels of those lovely Scheus. The palate is excessively vegetal, and while it doesn’t careen about the room upending the bric-a-brac, it’s not a welcome guest.

They tried for a deftness here (and there seem to be a few grams of residual sugar in the mix…) but the glare of the Scheurebes cast a pitiless light on this fellow.

Müller-Catoir Herzog Rieslaner Auslese 2021

Alc. A remarkable 11.5%, signaling either a not-very sweet wine or a massively ripe wine—so let’s see. 

Or let’s not see, for a fear this may be corked. There is massive botrytis, with which TCA can be confused….but this is, tragically, unmistakable.

Müller-Catoir Herzog Rieslaner Bereenauslese 2021 ++

The signal genius of Martin Franzen, and of the proprietor who enables and applauds his work, is to render even the richest wines with the same sleek lines that move like calligraphy throughout the entire range. This can make a wine like this one both explicable and inexplicable.

Explicable because you can taste it; its flavors are not washed over by gooey blankets of fructose, and inexplicable because you are entirely defeated by the complexity of what you taste. If a wine like this doesn’t pin your shoulders to the mat, you never entered the ring.

Rieslaner can (and often does) reach mega-ripeness by dessication rather than botrytis. You gather clean raisins. I think that’s what I’m tasting here. Because this is more an orgasm of clean Rieslaner than a wine wrapped in a heavy cloak of noble rot. At this level of concentration the talk is “bananas” or plantains, within which is all the fundamental insanity of this astonishing variety. I’ll keep taking teensy sips of this over the next bunch of days, but on first approach the wine is galvanic rather than enveloping. It sends a bliss-taser to your palate. It shrinks you, until you are ecstatically puny.

Müller-Catoir: A new language for Spätburgunder

The post Müller-Catoir white wines: Bliss-tasers to the palate appeared first on World Of Fine Wine.

Terry Theise begins his two-part review of the wines of Müller-Catoir with an overview of the great Pfalz estate’s genre-changing Spätburgunder reds.

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of the arrival of Martin Franzen as cellarmaster at this venerable estate. That’s an entire generation of drinkers, writers, and customers who’ve only known the estate under Franzen’s careful guidance. 

There is, let’s say, a celebrated history here, but I don’t think we ought to write about it any more. It muddies the waters and obscures the purity of the modern narrative. Yet it isn’t as if the new broom swept entirely clean. The tradition of not only cultivating but also cherishing varieties such as Scheurebe, Muskateller, and Rieslaner has been carried forward, thankfully. Nor does this conflict with Franzen’s central focus on Riesling—and recently, Spätburgunder. It simply adds complexity to the portrait.

The Pfalz is a place of cheery commotion these days, especially in the “classic” corridor consisting of the triumvirate of Deidesheim, Forst and Wachenheim. The first of these is home to Bassermann-Jordan, Von Buhl, and to those impassioned radicals at Von Winning, who have upended every existing notion of what German Riesling could be. Forst in turn is home to several excellent small growers, while Wachenheim offers up both Loosen’s J.L Wolf estate, and of course the resurgent youthful team at Bürklin-Wolf. These aren’t the only top estates in the region, of course; there’s Knipser and Rebholz among others.

And then there’s Müller-Catoir, rather off the main drag, up the hill below the villa, cultivating an air of remove that can suggest the monastic, and certainly indicates the introverted. Proprietor Phillip David Catoir will demur, and he’s certainly doing more outreach than did his forbears. But perhaps he’ll forgive my observing that among the most important producers in the Pfalz, Müller-Catoir is the least in-the-mainstream. And this is also true of the wines, stylistically.

Martin Franzen’s wines are diligently explicit but not overtly so. The Rieslings especially are interior wines, and as such they stand out in the Pfalz, a place of sometimes-bellowing extroverts. When Martin arrived, the standard rap was his wines were “like Mosel wines,” since he hails from a Mosel family. This truism was specious and inaccurate, (not to mention Mosel wines have all the affect in the world) but it seemed to stick as a dismissive shorthand. Among the society of significant reviewers, only Schildknecht and Pigott saw the wines clearly.

Another critical error was to judge the estate exclusively from its Rieslings. As diffident as these might (plausibly) appear, Franzen carried on the work of his predecessor in making one of the few greatest dry Muscats in Europe, and certainly in continuing to set the standard for Scheurebe. And then we have the Rieslaner to contend with, and if you’re thinking “But these are ancillary grapes,” well shame on you. To understand Müller-Catoir you have to engage with its entirety, and these Muscats and Scheurebes and Rieslaners are—I don’t hesitate to claim it—great wines. Their quality is not exceeded by anyone else making wines from those grapes. If the wines are relatively extravagant, they are by no means radical. They are classics.

But what of the Rieslings, after all? A few years ago Franzen began to want to “open” them up, to render them more animate and more approachable in their early youth. This was discernible in the warm vintages 17-18-19 but less so in 20-21—but what does it matter in any case? Franzen, who is gregarious and unpretentious, seems to enjoy an ethereal streak where his wines are concerned. Yet even that is facile. He really wants to refine the wines are far as is sensually possible, and in so doing he touches upon the ethereal incidentally. Yet even when the wines are as expressive as the human mind can ascertain, they have a piping, fluting chirrup of melody that you may not appreciate if you need your shoulders shaken.

Recently the estate has entered the fray with Pinot Noir. But being Müller-Catoir, they’ve done so in such a way as to suggest a new language for that variety to speak.

Müller-Catoir Haardt Spätburgunder 2020   +

This is the village-wine from Haardt, which is officially a suburb of Neustadt. You’ll have heard of its prominent sites Bürgergarten, Herrenletten and Herzog.

We have a limpid cherry color but no dearth of ripeness (13.5%) and I doubt that Franzen chaptalized it.  Given his general wish to micro-pixilate flavors, the precision of the PN fruit aromas won’t shock you. Nor will the lack (if “lack” it is) of opulence or flirtatious elements. 

Yet the palate will surprise you with its silken sensuality and with a fruit-sweetness that’s nearly adorable. An open texture suggests the use of barrels—I’d guess large ones (1,000 liters) and I’d also guess they are not well-used. The diligent clarity is almost caricaturized from the Jancis glass, from which a mintyness and smoke arise, feinting toward Blaufränkisch. (It’s said that mature Blaufränkisch starts to resemble Pinot Noir, so this isn’t as far fetched as it may seem.)

The wine is sophisticated but not aloof; it’s both impressive and enticing, a kind of elemental PN, full of complexity. At the end there’s a salty, almost limestony grip guided by a jot of crushed stones and tannin and even dried flowers. I’m sitting here not quite able to believe, or even to understand, how good this is.

Tasting it for the third time, and using the Spiegelau “red wine” stem, which tends to emphasize umami and mid-palate. But like all these wines, this one is relatively inert over the days, which I don’t mind at all. If anything it seems more silken and floral, but I may be reading that in. You know how wild lavender is a curious overlap of the floral and the feral? This lovely wine straddles the line between spicy (fennel and caraway and anise seeds) and flowery (veering toward the pungent, like day lilies). 

I never tasted anything like this. Given that anyone who makes Pinot Noir has Burgundy as a paradigm or lodestar, even people who protest they’re “not trying to make Burgundy,” this tastes like it was made by someone who never tasted Burgundy and doesn’t even know it exists. It is a beautifully weird PN, painted upon a blank canvas, referring to nothing but itself, and speaking a language of make-believe.

Müller-Catoir Mussbach Spätburgunder 2020   +

Another village-level wine, a little less ripe than the above (13%); the color is darker and the wine smells bloodier, and more (I hate to say it) “Burgundian.” It’s expressive and clearly delicious, juicy and redolent of cêpes and summer truffle.

This is a language we know. The wine is less studious, more roasted, more hospitable and warm and enveloping. Oak is also more overt, which makes the wine a little facile, but it’s senseless to resist its seductiveness, albeit it swims in the mainstream with lots of other German PNs. It’s an upstanding citizen of that world, mind you, but it’s also popular and gregarious.

And that said, in turn, it is also silken and detailed, markedly so given its creamy texture. Curiously, as it sits in the glass it gets stonier and more peppery, encouragingly. I suspect this will surprise me when I taste it again tomorrow.

Well, it does and it doesn’t. It remains disarmingly delicious, yet it continues showing a host of suggestive subtexts. Oak is prominent but neither unbalanced nor gaudy.

Müller-Catoir Neustadt “V” Spätburgunder 2020    +

Still officially a village-wine, but the taller bottle (and the enigmatic “V”) suggest we’re stretching higher now. Speaking of which, the letter that looks like a “B” in the Fraktur is actually a “V” and it stands for Vogelsang, the cadaster holding Catoir obtained, is developing, and which will eventually be a “GG” when the vines reach the necessary age. The soil is fossil-bearing limestone (“Muschelkalk”). 

Fragrances are more adamant, darker, rockier—and woodier.

The palate is Very-Serious-Business. If you took the limestony bite from red Burgundy and took away every trace of animality or earthiness or even spices, you might arrive here, at a kind of primordial Pinot, as if the grapes were picked by well trained dinosaurs. 

It has more of the stuff we all pay more money for, but I wonder whether it’s actually “better.”  It depends on the degree you’re willing to pony up for intensity, and most of us would find there’s more to this in every way. There is saliently more tangible structure, some of which has to do with oak tannin, but a lot of nuances ride along that spine of grip.

I drank a bottle of 2013 Clos Saint Denis from Stephane Magnien last night—lucky me! (We had some pintades and a Burgundy truffle thanks to a sale at D’Artagnan….) For all the profundity of the Burgundy, it was something you wished to absorb into your body, whereas this wine, delicious as it is, is something you wish to engage with your mind. It’s like someone reading a complicated poem and suddenly the obscure syntax makes sense and you get it.

I can imagine someone saying it’s too woody, or that it’s more Tempranillo than PN, or any number of things we might glean because the wine is so explicit, like tweezer-food in a glass.

Müller-Catoir Herzog Spätburgunder 2020

Now the single vineyard (Erste Lage in the parlance) and ostensibly the top of the quartet. The color, though, is happily limpid—I like PN like that.

I thought we might be dealing with cask once more, and we are. It’s neither crude nor blatant, but I’m always a wee bit distressed when a vintner thinks this is the dialect that “must” be spoken to indicate your wine is Serious. Yet within its idiom, it’s a successful and tasty wine, and that in turn is because Martin Franzen doesn’t seem to know how to make a wine that isn’t transparent and articulate. I mean, it’s a luxury for me to focus on my dismay, considering the many ways this wine might have been vulgar and sloppy. 

Among this impressive quartet, this is the least upfront of them. The flavors of the other three come down from above; this comes up from below. It seems to be hiding its cards. It’s a little more fleeting on the finish.  It’s the saltiest among them.

All the wines are smart and lovely, and I judge them more or less as equals. Yet the one I like the most is the first one, the original, the uncanny, the sui generis. Fine, right? I like the waifs. Here again, we get more juju with oxygen, more counterpoint to the woody sweetness, and we have a more deftly poised wine overall than, for example, the Mussbach. It is churlish of me to observe the wine is perhaps too plausible, but for now, I’ve seen this show before.

Müller-Catoir Spätburgunder Rosé 2021

This joins the superb rosé from Caroline Diel as a high water mark for class in this category, though Diel’s wine is richer and this one is more filigree. One would expect Franzen to limn the outer limits of diction in his pink wine, and so he does.

It’s the rosé you imagine they drank at the court of Versailles, as they made their arch remarks and remembered to extend their pinkies. That doesn’t mean it’s effete; it means it’s refined, and this is a word seldom deployed to describe a rosé. The wine is admirable and courteous in every way. It takes off its shoes when it walks in your door. It’s full of fruit but isn’t “fruity.”

It is exactly the sort of careful, fastidious wine you’d expect the estate to produce, and I give it my full respect. Here was a case where they might easily have pandered, but didn’t.

Müller-Catoir SEKT, Riesling, Brut, NV

30 months on the lees, and from the look of the cork it was probably disgorged about a year ago.  It’s as fine as one would expect, with an appealing aroma (lemon balm, and something linking white nectarine with heirloom apples) and yet, while nothing this winery offers is ever careless, this could be even further refined.

Do they keep it for a while post-disgorgement? Have they considered a lower dosage? I’m curious to see where this goes when I taste it again in a couple days, because as it sits in the glass its mid-palate richness arises, and the wine could make a fool of me.

As it happened, it didn’t. There’s an awkwardness here that’s at odds with the prevailing dialect at this address.

The post Müller-Catoir: A new language for Spätburgunder appeared first on World Of Fine Wine.

Terry Theise is captivated by the sparkling and white wines of Schloss Gobelsburg in the second installment of his two-part review of the latest releases from the historic Austrian estate. 

Schloss Gobelsburg: Moments in time

Schloss Gobelsburg SEKT, Vintage 2010 “Grosse Reserve”      ++

Disgorged September 21, 2020.

I tasted this among the other sparkling wines from the estate—uniformly superb, by the way—and found it just papery enough to wonder whether it was A) the nature of 2010, B) below threshold cork, or C) a shock in a group of much younger wines. I queried the winery how they felt the wine “ought” to show, and they kindly sent me another bottle.

Which I taste forthwith, aided now by my new Juhlin 2.0 stem, from which I have preferred every sparkling wine I’ve poured in it since May. I have the original Juhlin also. Say what you want about Mr. Juhlin; his glasses work.

All right; this is indeed a different wine, and I think cork was the culprit before. It is also magnificent sparkling wine by any standards, and I wonder whether anything greater has yet to emerge from Austria. It was acutely painful to spit—so I didn’t.

There’s a lot to say. It’s both incredibly fetching and superbly complex and also entirely integrated and whole. There’s no varietal marker, such that anyone would say “This definitely isn’t Champagne;” I rather think tasters would twist themselves into conniptions trying to figure out which Champagne it could possibly be.

It does not have the severity and acidity typical of many 2010s, nor does it suggest even the slightest decadence. The dosage is perfect–very low, and just enough. It is entirely Special Club quality, and it leaves a fleeting but haunting finish in which, for the first time, one glimpses a fruit note that takes one away from Champagne.

That fruit also emerges in the glass, recalling perfectly ripe mirabelles but also with a delicately saline note of langoustine and semolina. It has the dream and swoon of great fizz. And as it breathes, it does assert more of its own identity, and becomes easier to distinguish from Champagne, though it’s good enough to give many Champenoise a few nights of uneasy sleep.

I want to be responsible and to taste this multiple times over the coming days, but believe me, it’ll take every bit of will-power I possess not to drink it empty tonight. Ah, the austere offices of the careful taster….

Schloss Gobelsburg 2020 Ried Steinsetz (Grüner Veltliner)

Alc just 12.5%. As you know, this is a plateau site on ancient rocks carried by the primordial Danube, and as you also know, the grape variety appears only on the back label, as Michi believes it should be de-emphasized in favor of the site name.

The fragrance is lovely and classic Steinsetz, radishes and nettles and Sencha and mustard-greens. Some recent vintages have also displayed warmer yellow-fruit notes, but I’m not finding them here—at least not at first.

The wine is crystalline and classy. In common with many ’20 GVs, it surrenders a bit of vinosity on the finish and shows both phenolic and bitter. “Bitter” is a hard word for wine writers to use, because it reads unhappy, and yet there are times it’s an attractive quality, as I acknowledge, though I myself have a problem with it.

My faithful Spiegelau renders it juicier and saltier. It’s too exposed in the Jancis. But from both glasses there’s a coarse sort of capsicum heat at the end, having nothing to do with alcohol, but rather as if it had a knob of wasabi in one of the vats.

A curious beast, this is. While its textural rough edges are exposed in the Jancis, there’s also more nuance and dialogue, whereas it’s both simpler and more comely from the Spiegelau. A pleasing note of wintergreen emerges, and this shape-shifter may have a few tricks up its stinging green sleeve.

Three days later I’m examining it from the MacNeil Crisp & Fresh. I want to see if grows less angular and more hedonic, and in many ways it does. It’s both tastier and more coherent now. No bitterness in sight. It seems to have hoarded Austria’s entire Strategic National Reserve of rotundone.

Schloss Gobelsburg Tradition, Heritage, Cuvée 3 Years                                               ++

The best way to taste (or to drink) these is outdoors, if you possibly can. First you want fresh air. Then, if you have a deck or someplace that’s yours where you can sit, it’s lovely to pour the wines and then sit still.

After a few minutes the local critters get used to your being there, and they resume their business. Eventually some of them may approach you, out of simple curiosity, like the woodpecker who perched on my deck’s banister to check me out. He was maybe three feet away, sat quite still, and just looked at me.

You don’t have to “let” it all come to you; it just does. You realize how fine it feels to be lambent, to be included in the world. Even your little local world has all sorts of things going on.

You might also perceive it’s a good way to receive wine, and certainly this kind of wine, the breathy contemplative kind. After a while I realized I had started to swallow. I wasn’t taking notes. It was internalized, and accessible when I returned to the task of description.

I think it would be hard to drink these wines when there was noise and activity. I mean you could but it would be like someone reading a poem while everyone else was singing Happy Birthday.

Please see my previous report on Gobelsburg for details on this series, which I will summarize here. It seeks to enter into and emulate the frame of reference of the pre-technology cellarmaster, whose relationship to his wines was not mediated by machines and who worked with the tools and materials at hand, and formed a frame of reference on that basis.

At first the “Tradition” wines were varietally directed, a GV (usually from Renner) and a Riesling (usually old-vines Gaisberg), but as the 850^th anniversary of the domain approached, Michi sought to de-couple these wines from varietality, and also to offer them at various stages of development. Thus we’re not addressing “vintage” or “variety,” but instead we look at the effects of development as-such.

Last year I tasted the 50-year bottling, a once-in-a-lifetime wine if ever there was one. Here we sit with the “merely” three-year fellow, and the truth is, it’s a gorgeous and mysterious being. Its relative “youth” is honestly not a factor.

What is a factor—and excuse me for being polemical—is that this wine embodies all the affects and ambitions of the Naturalistas without demanding you accept many and varied flaws.

It’s both meditative and sweet-natured. There’s a fine painting by Thomas Eakins called “The Thinker, Portrait of Louis N. Kenton”, that’s on the cover of the NYRB-Classics edition of Stoner the magnificent novel by John Williams that you really should hurry to read. Everything about that painting is living inside the fluid of this wine.

But it resists being depicted in tasting-note form. I won’t even try.

The wine is above all redolent; it doesn’t queue a bunch of flavors into a receiving line for you to greet. It indicates a reality. It’s a pensive ambience; it refers to things long lived-in, lived in clothes, lived in rooms, the keen sort of triste when the autumn fields are a melancholy brown but the harvest is in the storehouse. It’s done, it grew, it’s there, and now the land is empty, and snow is on the way…

 What other wine is like this? None I can think of. Now and again maybe something from Nikolaihof, at least the aldehyde-free wines. I have a weird image of a Manzanilla Sherry that someone forgot was in a cubby in the cellar, and that grew old gracefully.

But what’s really captivating here is the sense of lostness allied to a sense of sweetness and approval. Really, this is a loving wine!

It’s fair to observe either the presence or the inference of a small bit of sweetness, and in any case the wine is peachy, alongside its more ethereal attributes.

Schloss Gobelsburg Tradition, Heritage, Cuvée 10 Years                                        +++

The color isn’t so much darker as more  deeply golden. The bouquet is both more profound, more earnestly determined, and more Sherry-like.

I don’t have them side-by-side, this one and the 50-year, but as best I can recall, I love this even more. Nor can I fathom how a wine can be any more beautiful than this.

But there’s a kind of beauty that praises the divine, the inexplicable, and the sublime. Usually it is incandescent. It can make us sad, but it doesn’t entail sadness.

This beauty, on the other hand, is like little birds sitting on hundred-year-old gravestones, keeping company with the departed. The wee chirping finch who’s living now, for a small while. Songs and sorrow, little lives and lost lives, that’s what this wine gives us, and you don’t have to feel the things I do, obviously, but if you don’t stop your onrushing and urgent agenda for the few seconds it takes to hear this, then please buy a different wine and don’t waste this one.

Almost unfathomably, there’s something paradoxically fresh in here, even more so than in the “younger” wine. It shows up about midway through the palate, just as you’re contemplating every woeful thing you ever knew, and it says “Oh no you don’t!” and pulls you into a glow you don’t quite consent to.

Too much imagery? I’m sorry; it’s really hard to find accurate cognates. I’ve had very old Chablis that showed similarly. I’ve had really old Riesling that conveyed the nut-oil thing you’ll taste here. I can imagine ancient Hermitage Blanc acting a little like this. But as you see, I can’t answer the question “What does it taste like?” Unless that answer can be It tastes like nuts, mysteriousness, and all the loved ones you’ll miss as long as you live.

A wine like this seems to speak from the other side of the grave. It says that death is a rearranging of the ingredients of life and it lives hard with you, with all of us on this side of the ground. And if I’m honest, I don’t know whether to believe that. I need something not so nebulous.

But I don’t mind chewing and rubbing at the question, living with it for a while, as this wine walks the cloisters of the heart, reciting its quiet vespers.

You might imagine that an “old” wine like this would be fragile. It’s not. It is in fact the opposite; if you leave the last drop in your glass, you go back to it a half hour later and it’s only gotten sweeter. No oxidation, no acetification, just a kind of Lux Aeterna of splendor and trouble.

The post Schloss Gobelsburg sparkling and white wines: Splendor and trouble appeared first on World Of Fine Wine.

In the first installment of a two-part report on the latest releases from the great Austrian estate, Terry Theise engages with the red wines of Schloss Gobelsburg.

Schloss Gobelsburg sparkling and white wines: Splendor and trouble

A brief précis of what I mean by “tasting”

I do not intend this writing to tell you What. Wine. To. Buy. In the event it does that, it is inadvertent. Nor am I tempted to join the rather swollen stream of guides whose purpose is to issue ironclad evaluations from which you can decide what (or whether) to purchase. There’s plenty of that, and much of it is done very well.

My task here, and with all of these reports, is to consider—and apologies if this sounds pompous—a phenomenology of tasting. In my view, the collision of a taster and her tasting object constitutes a narrative. If I am correct, these narratives are poorly served by the “Good fruit….fragrant….nice creamy texture….decent length….” vein of tasting notes. I respect them, mind you, but I see my work differently.

The way I see my work can appear self-indulgent. Guilty as charged! The question is whether the self being indulged is interesting enough to claim your attention. I hope that it is.

Tasting, for me, is a process of engagement with a flavor in its moment. It therefore needs to depict that “moment” and in order to do that it needs to describe a variety of contexts, that of the wine, that of the environment of tasting, and those of the impulses that arise.

The origin point is the way the wine tastes. That is less than concrete, though we may wish it were otherwise. Wines change according to the sequence in which they’re tasted, and the glass being used, and the temperature (both of the wine and the place where it’s tasted). So before I can say Here’s how it tasted I need to establish Here’s how it was while I tasted it.

I presume that wine exists in a nexus of emotion and beauty and imagination. In the process of describing and deconstructing and evaluating its flavors it sometimes suffices to stay within the wine as-such, and how it happens to have tasted.

But at other times a wine wriggles free of that stricture and starts to roam the world, and when that happens the narrative needs to ask, where is it going and what does it see? And finally, does this engender strong feeling? And if it does, is any good served by ignoring them?

The wine itself will tell me when I’m done with it. That’s what usually happens. But some wines never feel finished, and when that happens all I can do is abandon the process, as no conclusion offers itself—or the bottle’s empty!

I’ll risk being pompous again. If the way I write about wines amounts to “literature,” I’d be pleased. Tasting is important, and needs a literature beyond the quotidian functions of the usual tasting notes. “Wine writing” is pretty silly if you think about it. But writing about wine, or even about individual wines, is a worthwhile endeavor provided wine receives all the respect due to its amazing richness of context.

The question of whether I’m good at it is for you to determine. The question of whether it ought to be done that way—has been decided!

Schloss Gobelsburg: Late arrivals; insofar as these shipped last December and reached me two weeks ago.

We begin with a few reds in the “reserve” echelon. All tasted at 62ºC.

Schloss Gobelsburg 2018 Pinot Noir Reserve

Before I get into the wines, a not-surprising development. You’ll see I was relatively tepid toward this and quite warm to its St-Laurent companion. This was true while tasting, and remained true when tasting again after a few days. But the two wines flip-flopped at the end, and especially at the table, where the PN began to shine and the SL acted brutish.

And so I repeat, with apologies, the bromide that wine is one way when it’s being tasted and judged and another way – sometimes another way entirely—when it’s being used.

Obviously this isn’t the estate trying to glom on to a “trendy” grape variety; Pinot Noir has a long association with the Cistercians, who surely will have brought it to Austria with them. Vinification is traditional, aging is in local oak and filtration is “only slight.”

Wood feels prominent, at least at first. I have the Spiegelau red-wine stem and the Jancis, from which the aroma is subtler and more fruit-driven. The palate, too, is substantially better, and I think I’ll stay with this stem.

It’s hard to know what is a reasonable expectation for Austrian PN. The Bründlmayer I wrote about last year was as refined and (in the best way) as “interior” as could be desired. But I’ve encountered such wines only sporadically.

This one, from the hot 2018 vintage, is expressive, a little incoherent, with a clamor and force that’s maybe not supported by the mid-palate, but it’s got loads of sweet fruit. Overloads perhaps. I suspect I’d have preferred the “regular” quality, though that’s just conjecture.

Often PN will locate its mid palate richness with time and air, so I’ll defer a final judgment until I’ve tasted it a few more times over a few more days. That said, this first-impression is valid and faithful to my feelings right now. And the fifth (and final) sip was the best one yet.

It became an accommodating and gracious companion, finally, with food, and I was sad to see it go.

Schloss Gobelsburg 2017 St-Laurent Reserve +

From the site Haide, a high-elevation wind-blessed site on tertiary gravel—St-Laurent needs air movement to counter its tendency to rot, as the clusters are tight and the grapes thin skinned. Michi Moosbrugger is a believer in this challenging variety, and one of the (very) few in the Kamptal who grows it. It’s aged in 600-liter casks, again from local wood.

Its aromas are more fulfilled, complete and of-a-piece now, and the palate follows. This is bloody excellent wine, and “bloody” is apropos, as it has all the wonderful animality of SL without a scintilla of the reduction that can mar so many. It’s earthy, sophisticated and gorgeous—all at once.

This time the Jancis exaggerates its typically smoky char, placing it front and center and making the wine less delicious. There’s more umami and integration in the Spiegelau. Obviously this is a different variety (than PN) but my sense is, this wine grasps what the PN was struggling to reach. When SL is this good it is uniquely original and satisfying.

Put it this way: you’d drink the PN with eggplant you sautéed, and you’d drink the SL with eggplant you fire-roasted, or left on the grill a minute too long.

Coffee drinkers and people who like dark chocolate will be at home among these flavors, but I am no lover of either and I feel totally familiar with what’s going on here. As always, SL is spherical (like PN) and a little charred (like Mourvèdre) and that call-response is singularly interesting and delightful. For a “rural” sort of wine, this has the smarts and grace of Gobelsburg’s white wines at their typical best. And the right food will keep it singing its lusty heart out.

Schloss Gobelsburg 2016 Zweigelt Reserve

Also from the Haide, and also aged in 600-liter casks of local wood, this is mature enough to have shed nearly all its primary fruit. As that fruit is certainly the most enticing element of Zweigelt, what remains now?

It’s claret-like, almost cedary; Weinviertel grower Hans Setzer’s Zweigelt often shows this idiom also. If you toss fresh herbs into a hot skillet, an aroma arises that’s sort of generally resinous, and this wine is certainly herbal—summer savory and marjoram—and also darkly floral, as though you’d warmed violets on a cedar plancha.

It is also…opaque is too strong; perhaps translucent or allusive. From the Riedel Chianti Classico it is quite inexpressive, albeit there’s a general vinosity that doesn’t offer any details. The Jancis curls it open but also reveals some tannin and a certain rusticity.

It’s that rarest of creatures, a Zweigelt that needs time and should open up in perhaps another 3-4 years, when it will reach a decade. It’s certainly earnest for Zweigelt, asking not for a pizza but for a roasted shoulder of lamb.

Or so it seems on day one.

Three days later the fragrances, while still dense, are much more expressive. There’s also a newly arrived (and subtle) reduction to contend with. Michi Moosbrugger feels that Zweigelt is the victim of a vicious circle: because it is assumed to be trivial it is planted in mundane land, and because it’s planted in mundane land it gives (mostly) mundane results.

This he seeks to remedy. “The more people claim that they never had a serious Zweigelt in their life, the more ambitious I get to prove the contrary, “ he says.

Now admittedly, there are other ambitious Zweigelts in Austria, but very few in Lower Austria and even fewer in the Kamptal. It’s worth asking, or wondering, what might the ceiling be for this unfortunately attractive variety?

This overachieving 2016 is a gesture in that direction. It mixes the blackberry side of Syrah with the sweet fruit of Cab Franc (minus the peppers) and has a berried quality like a mélange of rose hips and cassis. I think it is most viable today on day-3, actually, and we’ll finish the wine with dinner tonight, and I say that because below all the richness there’s a surmise of decadence that I don’t want to let grow. It’s more apparent from the Jancis, as is its precursor, a tasty smokiness.

I like the wine, and admire Michi’s dogged commitment to raising the profile of the variety.

The post Schloss Gobelsburg: Moments in time appeared first on World Of Fine Wine.

Terry Theise tastes—and drinks—the wines of Cedric Moussé, a Champagne producer at the forefront of the revolution in Meunier in the Marne Valley.

You’ll have noticed, if your life is so drab and wretched that you’ve had time to read my previous reports, that I talk about the distinction between “tasting” and “drinking” wine, how those conditions differ, and how they bear upon wine both singly and as a (sort of) dialectic.

Usually the way a wine tastes is indeed different from the way it drinks when we’re not paying obsessive attention to it. Some wines are better when tasted, some are roughly the same, and some are best when they’re consumed. I haven’t formed a hypothesis whereby I could discern or predict a pattern. That is, I can’t identify a type of wine that’s likely to be better one way or the other. Even if I start to think that high-acid wines are better with food, or just better when consumed casually, some wines will come along to challenge that theory.

What can be said is, if there is any issue with a wine’s finish, that perception will diminish when one isn’t attending to it, i.e., when eating or simply when talking to someone in the kitchen while food’s being prepped.

Tasting, drinking, evaluating

My method of evaluating wines by taking both tasting and drinking into account is an attempt to flesh out the picture, to show a deeper truth, even if that truth entails contradictions (as many truths do), and to add to my experience of the wine/food relationship. Nor is it a contest to see in which matrix the wine is “better.” The two approaches create a palimpsest, in which the revelation is that the superimposed truths create a whole truth greater than the sum of its parts.

I bring this up now, because Cédric Moussé’s Champagnes almost always “showed” best when tasted, and I’ve wondered why. It occurred to me that drinking them in the evening meant having them on a palate that had spent the day tasting them, and maybe my palate was just shot. In that context I also noted that the best evening wines were the least dry—but I prefer to shy away from making this report “about” dosage, except to say it conferred a gras that was welcome after a tasting day.

But you never know what a wine might reveal. I admired the articulation and seriousness of the Champagnes while tasting, but some of that seriousness felt sour later at the table. You will find me effulgent with veneration for most of the Champagnes, yet at the same time I wondered exactly how I’d use them.

Catching a rising star

I feel like I’ve known Cédric Moussé since he was a kid, though of course I haven’t. When we first started doing business it was clear he had huge potential, and would need time to find his way. Some of the first wines he sent over ran counter to the Zeitgeist—not severely dry enough for the hipsters of that era—but it was always, always clear to me that this was Meunier of another type entirely. Having lost out on what turned out to be outstanding agencies by meeting them too soon, when the wines weren’t as stellar as they’d later become, I was determined to avoid that mistake with Moussé.

And so it’s deeply gratifying to observe that Cédric is no longer a “young grower” who’ll go on to do great things. He’s lifted off the runway; he is in flight. Of course he will continue to improve, as his is a restless nature, but I find he takes his place in an elite society of growers doing singular and remarkable work. He’s at the forefront of the revolution in Meunier in which an entire new generation is taking the variety seriously and exploring the limits of its possibility. There are any number of Heroes-Of-Meunier in the Marne Valley (and elsewhere), but where Moussé establishes his special eminence has partly to do with terroir (soil and landscape), partly to do with having had a father who loved and respected the variety, and partly with the imponderable, with the irreducible vision common to visionaries.

There’s no reason, it turns out, why Meunier has to be broad and earthy, no reason it can’t show minerality, no reason it can’t attain great elegance, and no reason it can’t enact a firm brightness we expect from Chardonnay but not from Meunier. And so I bow to my friend, for what he is achieving, even while I would challenge some of his particular choices. That said, the greater context is the entire achievement, irrespective of such cavils as I may have with this wine or that.

Note: These are tasted in ascending order of “sweetness” though all of them are very dry. Thus some of the “top” wines may appear early on.

Moussé Fils Les Vignes de Mon Village, Brut NV (Blanc de Meunier)

A tribute to Cédric’s father, who left us much too soon, and who was a staunch believer in both Meunier and Cuisles itself. Disgorged 7/12/21, from a perpetual blend of 2014-2019.

The wine is entirely Cuisles and entirely Meunier. If you’ve forgotten (shame on you!), Champagne brokers (and other insiders) consider this village to be the Grand Cru for Meunier. So….

The fragrance is papery, crusty and ever so slightly aldehydic, but the palate works improbably well, for a zero-dosage wine. Only on the finish is there an asperity (which could be a disgorgement issue rather than an RS one, and in any case even zero-dosage Champagnes have a smidge of sweetness as a residue of tirage), but the actual palate is interestingly fluffy.

There’s a toastiness common to many of the new-wave Marne Valley Meuniers, and it’s likable, but it’s also not distinctly Cuisles, at least that I can taste. Not to flog the dosage issue, but I feel that a higher dosage would have made this wine more individual, assuming that was Cédric’s desire.

The first finish is the best part; suave and savory and brown-buttery. I have usually respected this wine more than I liked it, but I’ve also never had the chance to follow a bottle over many days. So let’s see if this fellow finds a vein of kindness in his otherwise stern nature. There is cause for hope.

Okay, now it’s five days later, and we drank twice from the bottle with food, and what can we learn? We have more spice now; cardamom, baies rose, harissa, and an iris aroma I wouldn’t have been shocked to sniff in an Urgestein GV. The wine is simply more generous, enough so that its paucity of dosage becomes less relevant. And yet this is all theoretical, because who will consume a bottle this way? It suggests an incipience in the wine that most drinkers will never glimpse, and I don’t think we should have to.

So we have a palimpsest of Champagne, a gnarly first impression covered over by a far more agreeable later impression (we even have a tangible note of chalk at this point), and both impressions are true, and so the wine is in fact at least two wines, and the way you drink it determines which one you get. But, these impressions may well draw closer over time, and so my final judgment is to defer final judgment until/unless I can taste the wine with three years on the cork.

Mommy, I’m confused!

Moussé Fils “Anecdote” 2017 (Les Deux Lieux-Dits) +

Disgorged 2/3/21, the one and only all-CH from this grower, though he doesn’t say “Blanc de Blancs” on his label, preferring to focus on the terroir.

This is fascinating Champagne, and one I hope Peter Liem finds a way to include in any cross-regional flight of Chardonnays—because I know of no others like this. Minerality is constantly implied but only grows explicit on the first finish. “Fruit” is so discreet it may as well not exist, yet the impact of savor makes it a fully rich mouthful. Saline, kelpy, sesame, sea-lettuce, rusks, dill-seed, legume…all adding up to nothing like the sum of those attributes.

Rather, the wine’s gestalt is more herbal and even minty if you just let it wash over you. The finish is a circus of nuance, and the wine is beautifully incoherent; its shape is the firing of details in every direction at once. It is compelling, even stirring, without ever really being beautiful. How it manages to assemble its facets into a finish of such length, depth and grip, I couldn’t explain.

I can remember earlier vintages of this wine that were more accommodating, more “pleasing.” Neither better nor worse, just different. Cédric is following his vision, as is proper, and if he told me he prefers a fascinating wine to one that is merely charming, I’d appreciate that POV. This is indeed a better wine than it used to be. It has authority and complexity, but it is also earnest and cerebral, and my reverence for those qualities reflects the qualities themselves—cool, cerebral, a little aloof.

Like many of these wines, this one alludes to “fruit” more or less constantly, without ever committing itself to being fruity. Nor need it be. We have plenty of fruit-forward Champagnes, but very few with this articulacy and individuality. Ginger and mint stand in place of apples or jasmine. As does a nuance of guava—but remember, this is five days after opening.

Moussé Fils, Terres D’Illite 2017 Blanc de Noirs ++

Disgorged 2/25/21, 95Pm, 5PN, a blend of 23 plots.

The vein of Illite (read about it here: https://www.mindat.org/min-2011.html) is unique to this part of Champagne, to a capillary that runs between Cuisles and Jonquery, and Moussé is the only producer I know of who cherishes it enough to feature it in a cuvée.

It is outstanding Champagne by any reckoning, often my own favorite in the range, and as best I can determine, one of a kind. Is its remarkable flavor due to the illite soil? Maybe! But an obvious inference is not available, and so we observe the correlation and wonder what it might signify.

The results, in the glass, have always shown a determined focus rare for Meunier, and allied to a resplendent deliciousness having nothing to do with dosage (for once) and everything to do with a fruit enflamed with something, whatever it might be. We go to the Special Club to see the regal majesty of Meunier, but we come here to see its expressive possibilities, as this wine is simply more many-faceted and articulate than anything I’ve tasted from the variety.

There’s a kind of venn-diagram with Meunier (as expressed here) and really good Pinot Gris, which is to say the Champagne doesn’t “read” red, as one might expect. It’s doughy, as Meunier tends to be, but it’s like spelt or even teff. But whatever it is, it’s a superb vintage of a wine that’s becoming an Icon of Champagne, a sort of ne plus ultra of Meunier.

But let us test that theory….

Five days later, and from a bottle we only broached once in the interim, there’s an oxidative note I ascribe to the vintage, along with a “sweet-earthy” note that makes me think of Chartogne’s Les Barres. The palate remains wonderfully buoyant, and this is Meunier at its most articulate and least ingratiating. Given the burgeoning number of serious Meunier wines coming out of the Marne valley, this would take a rarefied place among them in a comparative tasting. While the (upcoming) Special Club would hit the operatic notes, this one would be offstage tweaking the fine points of the libretto. And as (justly) celebrated as that Club is, I think this is Cédric’s most significant wine.

Moussé Fils Special Club 2016 Les Fortes Terres Meunier   ++

Disgorged on 3/15/21, four parcels in one Lieu-Dit in Cuisles, and as you know, the first-ever 100% Meunier Special Club.

Trying to limn the distinction between these two Meuniers is either a fool’s errand or a path to some sort of enlightenment.

The Club has what it should have: An immediate sense of Significance. A feeling of something regal, and a hint of divinity. Or so one hopes. We certainly find it here (along with a slight volatility? I’ll try a fresh stem.) and I am certain most tasters will see this as clearly the “better” wine. They’re not wrong. The affects of greatness here are justified by many actual elements of greatness. The wine is superb. Even the mousse is more silken (the kings and queens wear finer garments than even the landed gentry, you see).

In a way we have the alpha-to-omega for Meunier with the two wines, this one being the noblest, and the last one the most fundamental. Tasting the two will tell you most of what you need to know about this variety. (As an aside, this wine tastes less dry but is actually a little more dry; its colossal fruit stands in for RS.)

The length here is almost ridiculous. It’s the utter glory of Meunier, just as the last wine was the utter Truth of Meunier.

There is a kind of serenity a grower can attain when he is in full competence, whereby he is able to bring his vision to life. If Cédric isn’t there, he’s pounding away at the door. One sip of this magnificent wine will convince you.

It is again five days later, but this bottle was untouched in the interim. And really, the wine is ludicrously beautiful, a parfait of cinnamon and maize, a smart hedonism reaching to a vivid apex. I remember back to the 2006, when it was a novelty to show a “Meunier Club” (and also the wine was good!) But this pilot is flying the big planes now.

Moussé Fils L’Or D’Eugène Brut NV +

This is the basic NV, disgorged 7/12/21, based on vintage 19 with its perpetual reserve going back to 2003, 80/20 PM/PN, and while the label says “Brut” it would qualify for Extra-Brut. Cédric is also candid about the RS left after tirage—the first time I have seen this on an actual label.

Always instructive to taste the smallest wine after the biggest one, right? This one, it would seem, is entirely adorable, as it happens.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that this is Cédric’s most “mainsteam” wine. In that context, what does it tell us?

It says that Meunier doesn’t need to be slack. It can show all its seductive tastiness and still be firm. It can also be more fresh and lively than it is doughy and toasty. It can be insanely delicious without needing to ingratiate—and this is an abiding riddle with Meunier. Too sweet and it’s marmalade-y, but correcting by excessive dryness makes for this dry phyllo-dough thing, which has a nice crunch but you wouldn’t make a meal out of it. The solution, as we see here, is you place the flavors an octave higher, and then you don’t need a lot of sweetness yet everything sings.

Crazy Terry Metaphor Alert: I live nine miles from the Atlantic, and when we have certain storms we get a lot of seagulls blown over here, and it’s goose-bump beautiful to see them in flight, whether against a cloudy sky or a sunny one. Okay, normal, ordinary birds, but when I see them here, inland, they look like little Gods against the skies. And this wine, this “ordinary” NV Brut, flies with a sudden, improbable grace, quite ordinary yet aloft somehow.

Metaphors aside, what’s it like? It’s like the most focused, disciplined, and has-its-shit-together Blanc de Noirs you ever could taste. I know how often I say this, but when you judge a vintner by his “smallest” wine, you know that vintner in his very soul.

I’ve struggled to keep my hands off the open bottle. This is dangerously tasty stuff. And I suspect it has very few cognates in Meunier-world—at least based on what I’ve tasted.

Moussé Fils Rosé Effusion, Perpetuelle de Blanc et de Rouge

Disgorged 21/6/21, 92/8 PM-PN, and a blend of two perpetual reserves, 2003-2019, one being red and the other white, i.e. Blanc de Noirs.

Confused? The Champagne has the color of cranberry. I infer a 2019-base, and it is very dry at least on paper. But this has always been a bold rosé.

And this is bold, almost savage, certainly impolite—and whether you think “yes but in a good way” depends on your tolerance for funk. Mind you, no more than the average St Laurent (and if you told me SL was in this blend I’d totally believe you), and part of me admires Cédric’s refusal to compromise. This is a strong, vinous, rural wine, bloody and lashing and visceral—on first glance. The days may bring another perspective, and the wine has the stubborn length they all have shown.

We’re well within “Extra Brut” territory, and I would have argued for a higher dosage but still within that limit. “My” wine would have been more complete, richer, more melodic, yet it wouldn’t have been this snorting stubborn beastie Cédric wanted to make. Ultimately his view prevails, not for the aesthetics of the matter but because it’s more important the vision be unperturbed than that the wine pleases this person or that one.

Not to mention, I may yet come around. The last (fourth) sip takes me in another direction, and after a few days I may well eat my words—and drink his wine.

But, well, I’ve had a troubled relationship with this bottle over the days. This is my second “tasting” and in short, I liked it better in past iterations, and the reason is that the current wine is too dry to manage its powerful earthiness. It’s also an instance where a little more RS would have provided enough fruit for the animality to have been a pleasing nuance.

Moussé Fils Special Club Rosé 2017 Infusion de Meunier, Les Bouts de la Ville +

Disgorged 5/10/2021, 3-day skin-contact saignée, 100% Meunier.

Well that is an aroma.

Cédric seems to understand what “luxury” Champagne entails, as his two Clubs seem to be citizens of a different country. Clearly he likes a forthright Rosé. There’s nothing ethereal here. But there’s something of a perfect duck breast, from a great purveyor, cooked perfectly medium-rare, seasoned properly, and served with faro cooked in the liquid from reconstituted dried porcinis.

It’s savory, in other words. But it’s also not earthbound. There’s a floating elegance here, for all its solidity. We are in the cranberry/rhubarb/redcurrant vein of Rosé, and we are decidedly toothsome—yet not chewy—yet there’s a cardamom-like sweetness around the periphery. Someone dropped a whole clove into the stew pot by accident, and offered to fish it back out. “Nah, leave it there, it might taste good.”

To be continued.

Days hence, I’m finding this wine is best with a lot of white-space around it. In the bustle of a kitchen where dinner’s cooking, or even at the table in the whoosh of chatter, it loses the high notes and becomes a rather austere rosé. When “studied,” and allowing for its wee scrape of astringency, one can appreciate and admire it. As I do—but I’m not thinking “I must have this in my cellar,” as I have with several of its siblings.

I can perhaps imagine the thinking behind it. Cédric’s wines today have a certain adamant willfulness. This suits the whites, more or less (!) but if he’s thinking “The rosés have so much fruit I can allow them to be solemn and dry” then I would argue the opposite—not that they should be “sweet,” but just because you don’t want them singing like Michael Bublé doesn’t mean they have to sing like Tom Waits. (And speaking of which, where’s Paul Buchanan’s new album? It’s ten years since Mid-Air…)

The post Moussé Fils: Meunier of another type entirely appeared first on World Of Fine Wine.

Terry Theise concludes his immersion in the latest releases from the great Mosel estate Selbach-Oster with a look at the Spätlesen and Auslesen, as well as the wines of Weingut Alfred Merkelbach, where the Selbachs also oversee production.

Click here for Theise’s notes on Selbach-Oster's Spätburgunder and Pinot Blanc.

And here for Riesling Trocken and Kabinett.

2020 Zeltinger Schlossberg Riesling Spätlese

Curiously, this has a different accent than the Kabinett, more overtly stainless-steely and precise and vertical. I know Johannes well enough to not assume this was deliberate. Sometimes they just run out of Fuders. In any case, this has the spine and crispness we often see in their (Bernkasteler) Badstube wines, usually done in steel, as indeed this was.

The wine is markedly straight-edged and mineral, without the sigh and tendresse of the barrel wines, and as such it’s another vein of expression for Schlossbserg, direct almost to a point of being clipped. But that impression is deceptive, and is likely to change over time.

Speaking of which; how much time does a wine like this need? In my experience they tend to feel inert for the first 5-6 years, and only start to indicate their adult forms around 9-10 years old. But their true adulthood—assuming proper storage—tends to flourish around years 17-20. The Spätlese from the excellent 2001 vintage are showing that way, though it will take them another fifteen years before they start to taste “antique.” I bring this up because the barrel-made wines are always more available and accommodating, ie, you don’t need to wait for them (though you should), in contrast to this fellow, where patience is mandated. It also helps if you tend to forget what you have in the cellar.

Tasting it now for the fourth time, from the Jancis glass, it remains clear, a little tart, mineral, perhaps somewhat pedagogical.

2020 Graacher Domprobst Riesling Spätlese ++

I’m having another ur-Mosel moment. Is it the vintage, or is it because I haven’t been there tasting the newborn wines for two years?

Think of a grey-haired man—or a woman if you’d rather—who has found an old photo album while cleaning out a closet, and picture this man looking at images of himself as a child, his old eyes regarding a young version of himself, and if you hear the whoosh of the years, as you consider this tableau, you’ll know how I’m feeling now. I gathered this scent to my soul forty three years ago, and here it is again, and there are no years any more, there aren’t even days or minutes, there is just this, as it always was.

Resuming our regularly scheduled consensual reality, if you know the Domprobst Spätlese #10 from Willi Schaefer, this wine is a lot like that one, notwithstanding any differences in vinification. It’s about crunch, it’s about shale, it’s also about dryness, as the wine is another Selbach classic of usefulness. Who is making Spätlese like this any more? It’s also about leaping, buoyant energy, and the exotic almost Nahe-like fruit we often see in Domprobst. Not a wine of repose, but one of pure giddiness.

2020 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese +

I missed that smell. That brash, absurdly vital reek of baby-Mosel wine. I’d experience it hundreds of times each year, tasting and selecting in late March.

Have you tasted wine that made you laugh spontaneously? I hope you have. We are, one might say, more overt than we were with the Kabinett. We are not thinking spiritual thoughts at all. We are thinking about the zingers we wish we could land every single time. Maybe we’re thinking about Wehlen’s weird blueberry flavor, or about the deep pool of quince and vanilla that’s like a cold gelatin that hasn’t yet solidified.

If we ever had a puppy, we’re remembering that vitality and cheer and the insane energy but also the love we felt when the little guy was all worn out and we watched him sleep.

This is a ’20 that catapults its flavors to where the ice clouds are. Small wonder we classicists adore it. This iridescent cool beauty is the beating heart of exquisiteness. And the contrast to the golden strength of the ‘19s is awfully poignant.

2020 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese +++

This is one of those moments when one knows too much about wine, because it is an absolutely classic aroma from the vineyard, and that’s all there is to say. It’s site-plus-sponti, and I am of zero use to you—though my catalogues do have descriptions of the basic flavors from each of these crus—just sayin.’

Sometimes the ripe Sonnenuhrs can, let’s say, exceed themselves in velvety richness, though Johannes labors to retain their backbone. No labor required with this astonishing ’20, which is the very beating heart of what a Mosel Spätlese can ever be. The fruit is gigantic but discreet, and how can that be, you ask? Because the anchoring of cooly insistent slate just does not release its grip, and you are locked in its leafy green glade.

This is starting to feel like one of those culminating vintages for an estate, where everything that shines about them releases an achingly poignant glow, and you think “This is the vintage they were born to make.” It’s the antonym to another great Selbach vintage, 2012, which had authority and thrust and visible stature, but these ‘20s are like an underground city of silver.

Long-time readers will recognize when Theise-leaves-earth, so I’ll stop. Those readers will also know, even if they find my prose absurd, what kinds of wines send my soul free of gravity. They’ll find one here.

2019 Zeltinger Schlossberg Riesling Spätlese ++

A good vintage of this perennial favorite, yet from a random already-opened bottle it “read” rather sweet, possibly in proximity to a racier Hexamer. Seemed atypical for Selbach.

SECOND LOOK FROM AN UNOPENED BOTTLE: That’s more like it. Context matters! And this wine supports my theory that we’d see a leap from the rather demure Kabinett to this all-hands-on-deck Spätlese.

By Selbach standards this is outsized, even monumental. If you want to see Schlossberg showing all its attributes with little or no “interference” from botrytis, caskiness, or overt lees, this is your wine. And at its best—as it is here—these wines can make even our (properly) beloved Wehlener Sonnenuhrs taste … dare one say … relatively simple?

Fine, my “professional” palate acknowledges the preeminence of Zeltinger Sonnenuhr (and also Graacher Domprobst), but I like being washed in orgastic green. It’s like stumbling upon a plant in the deep woods that the guidebook says you can eat, and when you do you are filled with the most aching euphoria and also with a stunning, grateful calm. It feels like green to the very ends of beauty.

The wine’s like an Auslese from the 2001 vintage, and I expect it will taste as exquisite at 20 years old as the 2001 tastes today. Now I must defy the actuarial tables and see this for myself.

I did an EMPTY-GLASS experiment, after the wine was poured and tasted. My “control-glass” Spiegelau was by far the best residual aroma, an essence of the wintergreeny fruit of Schlossberg. The MacNeil, from which the wine itself was so overt, was almost devoid of aroma in the empty glass. Jancis was slatey and minty, not bad but less attractive than the actual wine. Why bother doing this? Two reasons: one, the smell of the empty glass is often a harbinger of the wine’s eventual development, and two, because I am fascinated by the various ways wines behave in different stems. In this case all three of them were suitable. It’s like you’re going to a party and your spouse is trying on different outfits. “This one?” “No, maybe the last one; you really rocked that one.” Same person, different clothes, different impressions.

Still, I gotta resist turning into wine-glass nerd boy.

2020 Graacher Domprobst Riesling Auslese +++

More time-travel here, as this smells like an Auslese I might have encountered from 1983. It’s ripe, of course, but somehow limpid and piping; it smells beautiful and asserts no richness whatsoever.

Unlike the sucrose parfaits that are too many modern Ausleses, this one starts from an essential dryness and then stretches upward, piercing skin after skin until reaching the point where the apple, at last, is ripe, that culminating moment before it gets too sugary. Indeed this wine is a silvery cold stream of divine fruit, or fruits set to some eerie celestial music, because whatever this is, it is like very few modern Auseleses I have had for at least 20 years.

Instead of the prevailing fructose-bath, we get a strange remote-feeling bat signal of fruit that has purified itself over a long journey through some twinkly schisty dust. By the time it reaches you it can no longer be fathomed. It is enormously numinous yet entirely silent. It gives you every possible scintilla of information by placing it so delicately into your hand you don’t feel it, and don’t know how you came to possess it. It is a room full of poets, whispering. It is some strange food that cooks over cold.

Will this moony being open into something more explicable and—dare I say “conventional”—over the coming days? We’ll see. I rather hope not.

I thought, after all these years, I was somehow equal to these Selbach wines. Looks like I need to think again.

2020 Zeltinger Schlossberg Riesling Auslese +

In contrast to the ethereal Domprobst, this is an earthbound beauty. It is a thing we know, have tasted before, and are reassured to be tasting again. In fact it recalls a great 1975, which we thought was the prototypical Mosel vintage; a delicate wine with the smell of golden ripe berries with a smattering of clean botrytis.

It is wonderfully refined and restrained. Nothing shouts and everything sings. It feels as though the slate is actually happy. The fruit shows the glow and relief of a runner crossing the finish line. “We made it…” The balance is seamless, the gestalt sophisticated; the entire wine is civilized and considerate. The finish is delicately honeyed, with echoes of malt, and sparks of slate.

In an era where we suffer from too many wines strutting some kind of machismo of must-weight, a wine like this, with its modesty and grace, is like a balm.

2020 Schmitt ++

Full name Zeltinger Schlossberg Riesling Auslese; it is A.P 015 21.

This great south-facing steep parcel is harvested in a single bloc at the end of the picking—conceptually the opposite of the idea of “Auslese”—and thus contains a full portrait of the vineyard, from green to yellow to gold to overripe and botrytis grapes, vinified together as a Whole. It was the first site to be thus harvested; two more have been created since then, a Rotlay from the Zeltlinger Sonnenuhr, and an Anrecht, from a parcel in the Zeltinger Himmelreich. The latter, distressingly, was corked.

This ’20 is quite a mosaic. I mean you really taste each little fleck of nuance here, from the not-quite-ripe to the overripe to the botrytis, not as a paint-by-numbers but rather as an entirety rendered so clearly that each element expresses. It feels on the dry side but that may be deceptive, because the minerality is just implacable.

Often I (and others) feel this is the great Selbach wine, almost every vintage, because it combines richness, clarity, concentration, and some X-factor of mystery to an exalted degree. Some years it’s really quite rich, other years it’s more cerebral, and this ’20 leans in a silvery shady direction and then leans the other way, toward little soft-skinned berries that burst in your hand if you grab them too hard.

There is, though a tension here. That’s fine if you like tense wines that don’t quite align. I think this is superb wine with some youthful dysphasia, and I’m hoping it is merely “youthful.”

It’s also one of the “drinky” vintages, though it helps if you crave the taste of geology. I like that it’s not quite this or that. It’s this vineyard in 2020—that’s all there is to it. It’s a professor of particle physics with a taste for butterscotch pralines. I’m hot for teacher.

2020 Rotlay   ++

See text for Schmitt on en-bloc picking; full name Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Auslese A.P. 016 21

Rotlay, a crazy-steep parcel much coveted by Mosel insiders (as well as several proprietors who dearly wish they had more of it), tends to be the “smoky” one among the en-blocs. In light vintages (such as the heart-rending 2004) it is nearly unbelievably beautiful. In riper years it can flirt with too-muchness, which is when Schmitt really shines.

This ’20 is a wine in motion, a changeling, and of all the wines it was the one that continually surprised me. The headline is: it is much better than it first appeared. The fragrance is was always amazing, but at first the palate was a miasma of disparate elements. That changed completely.

Finally the wine absorbed its sweetness and reconciled all its facets and became a savory/sweet sort of bomb of exotic vinosity that relates more to the (feinherb) Ur-alte Reben than to its siblings in the Auslese class.

There’s a lot of verbena and lime, and a crush of mineral (in contrast to the more jagged minerality of the Schmitt). It’s quite a green wine, in terms of anise-hyssop and wintergreen, and as such it shows an other-ness in contrast to the usual smoke and yellow fruits. There’s a botrytis pungency I expect will recede.

Mosel wines are often called “apple-y,” but there’s a way they push through to different octaves of apple—apple-cellar, baked apple, even other malics like certain pears or quince. Some of that malic echo is here, as though it’s calling from across a chasm. Yet it’s haunting for all that, raising its hopeful voice through the omnipresent green.

It’s all anchored to a very long finish, which is entirely integrated. And my empty-glass smell-test shows a clement blend of malt and smoke and mulling spices.

2019 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Auslese 2-star     ++

The impeccable malty botrytis fragrance calls to mind the best 2012s or even 2005s. The palate, too, is an extravagance of malt, chestnut and the butterscotch savor of aged Comté.

These kinds of wines age stupendously. Not because of how long they develop, but rather what they develop into. This will go all beeswax and chamomile when it reaches its tertiary life, and then its sweetness will be heart rending. Thus my two plusses. If you drink it now, it might seem attractive, even lovely, but also a little one-sided. Wait fifteen years if you can.

Climate change wines have spoiled us. Something like this would have been put on a pedestal in the 20^th century, seen properly for the monument it truly is. Nowadays we’re jaded. But I remember tasting Selbach’s 2012s and liking them very much, but when I tasted them again just three years later I was terribly ashamed; how did I miss their profundity? I swore I’d never make that mistake again. I might have taken for granted the light-footed solidity, and I might have merely glanced at the purity of fruit.

But you know, those Auslesen were tasted in the late afternoon of an all-day tasting of Selbach-Oster. Forty wines would have preceded them. Often there were multiple Ausleses. The demand for that category had waned. I wasn’t in the mood! But today I’ve had just one Auslese and I’m thinking of a perfect peach pie where the fruit stands out and the crust is buttery and the salting is wicked, and I don’t disavow what I did as a merchant—it had to be done that way—but I am aware that tasting this way frees me to be grateful. And so I am.

Over the days it was marvelous to watch the wine become less generic—the “genre” in this case being Big Auslese—and more particular, and by the 3^rd day it was clearly and definitely a Wehlener Sonnenuhr, referring back to its elemental form. It’s a kind of parting of the curtain, to look behind the monument and see the innocence.

Weingut Alfred Merkelbach

This old-school estate, run by the bachelor brothers Rolf and Alfred Merkelbach for many decades, had no heirs to take it over when they could no longer manage the work. But in a lovely example of the cohesion of the Mosel culture, the Selbachs, old family friends and long-term business partners, arranged to maintain the domain in as close to its existing form as possible.

There is no desire to make “Selbach” wines in Ürzig. Nor is there any reason to. Merkelbach has slowly become generally beloved—not just among my customers in the US—for their “virginal” style of Mosel Riesling. For the last several vintages Selbachs have helped out, and with 2019 and 2020 they have been doing it all, using the brothers’ cellar and Fuders and with only a few small adaptations to modern competences, which you won’t taste. These are still, recognizably, happily, wonderfully, Merkelbach wines.

Except for the dry ones, which are much improved!

2020 Riesling Trocken

I was never a fan of the brothers’ dry wines, and one time I shocked them by wanting to offer a Halbtrocken wine for which I’m sure they had other plans. “You want the Halbtrocken?” they asked plaintively.

This smells good, smells of Ürzig, actually, a lot of fir and ylang ylang. And the wine surprises me but actually being balanced, good, and original. That’s the Selbach touch, I am very sure.

But before I continue, what’s this “ylang ylang” thing that’s squatted in my notes the last few months? Simply this: I bought a set of “Chef’s Essence” flavor drops from the astonishing artisan parfumeur (and author) Mandy Aftel, who not only creates the finest scents I have ever experienced but also works with chefs to create a range of flavor bombs; a finishing drop or two will catapult a dish in a dramatically remarkable way. The set included a ylang-ylang essence, and as soon as I sniffed it I thought, “So that's what I’ve been smelling in so many wines and having no idea how to describe.” So it’s crowded its way in, and I’m kinda leaning on it. Proportion shall be restored, duly, eventually. Maybe.

Meanwhile there’s this weirdly compelling critter. Quince, iron, herbs, aldehydic and almondy in a not-disagreeable way; I’ve never tasted a Mosel wine like it, and have barely tasted any kind of wine like it. It tastes like some autochon as yet unidentified that the Nikolaihof people discovered in an abandoned vineyard next to one of theirs. Finishes with a wash of esoteric salts, and a bit of that gin-tonic thing we saw in Dautel’s Rieslings.

I don’t know whether the American importer offered it, but I’ve tasted nothing more original than this in many months, and you should try to get some if you possibly can. It’s also a (rare) example of a wine with an acceptable flaw.

2020 Kinheimer Rosenberg Riesling Spätlese Trocken +

This is more “correct” now, it stays in its lane, and seems to have benefited greatly from some Selbach magic, because it’s the most successful Trocken wine I’ve tasted from Merkelbach—and I’ve tasted every one of their wines since vintage-1985.

It has that ur-quality that resists description because it is entirely pure and not very particular. It’s just Mosel Riesling in its virginal form—dry in this case. So forgive me for the clichés, but they exist for a reason, and we have green apple and slate and conifer, and no sweetness, and a firm but gentle harmony.

This is done without the mid-palate “fluffiness” we often see in Selbach’s own wines. What’s in its place is a deep and extract-drenched mineral savor. I’m sure acidity was left alone (there’s an off kind of creaminess in many deacidified wines which isn’t present here) but I can’t account for the utter lack of pointedness that seems to be … a factor in (too) many dry 2020s along the Mosel. (Including, alas, some with august pedigree … )

I admire this thoroughly lovely and companionable (and interesting) wine more than I can say. For me it’s a high spot among the 2020s.

2020 Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Kabinett +

I was only sent one (there are often multiples), and this is A.P. 001 21.

This will maybe be my shortest note. The wine is impeccable. It is racy and vivid and shows every detail of each signature Würzgarten flavor. It has endless echo and mineral. For something so delicate it is stubbornly persistent. Beautifully persistent!

Back to the Eden of pleasure and wonder, before all our sophistication got in the way.

2020 Kinheimer Rosenberg Riesling Spätlese

Again impeccable, if at first the tiniest bit featureless after the Würzgarten mojo. But that may be deceptive, because it’s 45 seconds since I spat this guy out and the flavor is larger now than when it was actually in my gob.

In fact the wine is firm and dry-ish—which is a relief as the estate’s wines had become atypically sweet in 2017-2018—and while we don’t have the “erogenous” qualities of grand cru wines, we do have every possible goodness of good wine from a good vineyard. It pulls toward sternness without ever being stern; it is more adamant than its Trocken sibling, and its moderate RS is quickly overcome by the stampings of slatey feet.

2020 Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Spätlese (A.P. 004-21)     ++

2020 Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Spätlese (A.P. 006-21)     ++

There were many vintages when I was offered up to 8-10 Fuders of Würzgarten Spätlese, different parcels, different pickings, up the hill, down the hill, early in the harvest, late in the harvest … and while I sometimes found enough commonality in three or four casks to have suggested blending them, they were literally unable to, as their holding tank would only fit two Fuders! Selbachs seem to have solved this problem.

I asked for and received cadaster bottlings from sites such as Lang Pichter and Urglück, but perhaps these have been discontinued. No matter; there is enough wine. # 004 can be seen as the “regular” Spätlese and #006 as the “Gold-Capsule” sibling. I find #004 to be laugh-out-loud joyful.

It has the high-up flavor of Würzgarten where kiwi and sassafrass are preeminent over apples and strawberries, and where there’s a superb firmness in the wine’s core. And maybe when I get over giggling like a fucking lunatic I can try to tell you about this masterpiece of purity.

It’s a different purity than that of Dönnhoff or Schloss Lieser. It doesn’t shimmer and it isn’t mystic and it speaks to a different place in your soul. It doesn’t refer to “thought” or anything self-conscious, and it’s not ethereal. It is the reality when no one’s looking. “The world before people wrote poems about it” as I once said. It can’t be corrupted because there’s nothing to tempt it. All is as it should be. “Desire” hasn’t been born yet.

Merkelbach has never made Big Deal Look-At-Me wines, yet I know of no other wine grower who so regularly plugs in to the ur, to the origin, to the place where, to quote Spike Milligan, “The hand of man has never set foot.” (Or was that in Tintin??)

To AP 006 then, which adds those strawberries to the vineyard portrait; this leads toward fruit as-such and in general, with spice and mineral as supporting players. It’s the first wine where old vines seem to demonstrate their pithy interiority. It feels a little sweeter without feeling “sweet.” It’s easier to be fond of. It’s prettier. But as a pungency emerges we see the wine is more than one thing. An angular spicy paragraph of flavors set up astride the fruit. At first they were obscured; now they’ve thrown their coats on the bed and joined the party.

Which is the “better” wine? You can say #6 is more complete, if by that you mean it’s riper and fruitier, more refined. It is those things. And I love those things. We also pay more for those flavors, which I understand but still might challenge.

Put it this way, in the construction of a total flavor with spice, angularity and minerality and overt fruit in play,  is 70% angular/spicy/mineral and 30% fruity, and #6 is 60% fruit and 40% angular/spicy/mineral. You choose according to what tempts you, or you’re like me and you have to have both. (And if you’re like me, you may wonder what would happen if you combined the two wines. What indeed?)

2020 Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Auslese ++

(AP 002) This is the utter strawberry side of UW, with only a nuance of sassafrass riding below. Juicy and ripe for a Merkelbach wine, but none too sweet and with a really dramatic mineral wash on the mid palate. Tastes like it came from a site at the foot of the slope where the slate was crumbly, because unlike (for example) the Urglück cadaster-bottling, this leads with fruit—and the purest fruit you ever tasted—and then this gossamer slate just washes over you in an enveloping whisper.

And then with air it goes all salty and angular and hyssopy. And then the tertiary finish is stern and as good as dry. Over the days the wine grew even more herbal and mineral, until at the end it was the most rapturously beautiful Merkelbach wine I’ve tasted in a long, long time. A masterpiece, somewhere between the crispness of 2001 and the dreamy fruit of 2007, but better than either.

A note on scores by Terry Theise

I disapprove of points. I don’t recognize measuring wines against a notion of “perfection,” I think it’s a fool’s errand to assign absolute value to an ephemeral impression, and the more precise a scoring system purports to be, the more it actually misleads.

That said, my mind forms hierarchies of its own volition, and special wines warrant special attention. So I’ll revert to my deliberately inexact system of plusses—one, two, or three—to recognize the most remarkable wines. My plusses are sort of like Michelin stars. One plus is a wine that stood out. Two plusses is a wine that made me stop and consider the depth of its beauty. Three plusses is a wine that tingles with greatness, and offers a moment of profundity. Feel free to superimpose whatever scoring system you deploy; the point-systems are harmful but the folks who use them aren’t evil, so if you want to conflate my three plusses with a scoring range that makes sense to you, be my guest.

Extracted with permission from Terry Theise’s Tasting Protocols.

The post Selbach-Oster Spätlesen and Auslesen: An underground city of silver appeared first on World Of Fine Wine.

In the second part of his immersion in the latest releases from the great Mosel estate Selbach-Oster Terry Theise switches to Riesling (and Gewürztraminer) moving up the sugar gears from dry to Kabinett.

Click here for Theise’s notes on Selbach-Oster's Spätburgunder and Pinot Blanc.

Selbach’s marked success with dry Rieslings

First a small note that, as I write, the range of top “GG” from 2020 has yet to reach me, and when it does (I hope in the next couple weeks) those notes will be added herein.

It doesn’t surprise me that Johannes “gets” the parameters for successful (ie, delicious) dry Rieslings, but I asked him to detail what those factors actually are, in the vineyards and the pressing and the cellaring.

He says: “What one does do for flavorful dry Rieslings is to go for perfectly ripe, healthy fruit and to process it gently, ferment cool but not cold, give the wine slack in finding it‘s course and never force it into dryness.” (TT: my emphasis)

He continues: “Obviously there is the risk of stuck fermentations, but one has to accept it when nature decides ‘this is it,’ rather than employing all different kinds of “remedies“ to force it to dryness.”

So, I continued, you may have an idea or a plan that a wine should be dry, but ultimately the wine needs to go along with your plan! Can you tell me more about your starting-out point? When you’re considering the grapes, what makes you think These could make a good dry wine, assuming they co-operate?

“The grapes for the juice for our dry wines must be ripe, shouldn‘t be over-ripe. The juice must always be flavorful and literally ‘juicy,’ with an engaging fruit-acid balance and, very important: It has to have mid-palate umami. In other words, the flavors of the juice should ‘grow’ on your palate, fill out the palate and then be escorted by crisp but never screechy acidity.

“As a Mosel producer who has seen unripe vintages with aggressive acidity, we try to make sure the acidity is present and alive, but plays a supporting role, to give structure, without taking over the wine.”

I asked, assuming you’re tasting the grapes, when and how do you “know” something is indicated for dry wine?

“When you like to eat them. Those flavors are a big deal! When you have perfectly ripe fruit and you like those flavors, it goes without saying that the smell and aroma of that ripe fruit should also be perceptible in the end product, be it partially fermented or totally fermented. Even a totally dry wine, if made the purist way, without oak, vanilla and butterscotch seasoning, should certainly fly the flags of both the aromatic potpourri and the wholesomeness of the ripe fruit and the soil the vines thrive in.

“Above all, reigning supreme, is the interplay of fruit and soil, is balance,  is the equilibrium of the different olfactory and sensual offerings a wine can make.”

The journey from repugnance

My own opinion about dry German Rieslings has evolved as they themselves have. There was a time when most of them were truly repugnant. In the last 12-15 years, and for various reasons partly but not entirely due to global warming, the “community” of fine dry German Riesling has grown and grown, and as I myself had begun to prefer drinking “dry” much of the time, I was happy with this development.

It would be easy to taste the GGs and conclude that the “problem” with dry German Riesling has been solved. It hasn’t. Those GGs are very often excellent and sometimes really supernal—as they should be—but lying below them is a group of wines whose successes are more…let’s say hit-and-miss. The “hits” are wonderful, especially at the estate-wine level, and it could lead you to believe that all is well now, but you will continue to find thin, sour, shrill dry Rieslings, even from fine growers, and this is why we need to examine why many succeed and some still fail miserably.

What’s Johannes’ take on this? “Unfortunately many of the much heralded dry wines of today are aggressively dry with not much flavor at all, often bordering on acidic, mouth drying and with a certain harshness or even bitterness in the finish. I have started to speak up and share my observations since I do not want those aggressive, angular, often sour dry wines to become the new gold standard.

“The lack of flavor in in those wines is often covered up by the use of the new buzzword “salty”. The description ‘saltiness’ IMHO often stands for a barren emptiness  or absence of flavor.”

Amen.

2020 Zeltinger Riesling Kabinett Trocken

I don’t (yet) know what went into this but it tastes like Himmelreich in stainless steel. The fragrance is delightfully available and offers an un-affected welcome of green apple, conifer and jasmine. It’s a demure sort of being, with 11.5% alc, which makes the mineral assertiveness on the mid palate a bit of a (happy) shock. The finish runs a little phenolic but that’s okay, because we’ll all be glugging it, not preening over it with our discriminating palates.

Obviously I don’t know every Mosel grower, but among the ones I do know, no one has a deeper understanding of the parameters that go into making successful and delicious dry Mosel Riesling than Johannes Selbach. This sparrowy being has more charm and balance and minerality than many wines of far greater pretension (and cost)…and well yeah, you know me, I get verklempt over cheap wine that over-delivers.

2019 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese Trocken ++

First tasting in June 2021. Lots of (silvery-straw) color for a young Mosel wine. The fragrance is uproariously good, and the palate has the attitude of a long fermenter, though it doesn’t smell especially leesy. It’s powerful by Mosel standards, more impressive than delicious, and it tastes headier than its 12.5% alc would imply.

In fact what it most closely resembles is a Renner GV from Gobelsburg, which, if you don’t know, is a GV that feints decisively toward Riesling. This idiosyncratic and remarkable wine is markedly savory, and doesn’t jump through any of the usual hoops for Mosel Riesling. It is hard and grainy; it tastes like drought, like tough skins.

Yet it’s possible the fruit is suppressed, as the Jancis glass reveals furtive bolts of TCA. My impressions may be distorted by an improper bottle.

Re-tasted two days later at cellar temp (currently 62ºF), if there is below-threshold TCA it’s pretty well below. The wine’s still savory, salty and crusty, muscular and balanced in its way. Yet I am almost certain a healthy bottle would show more fruit. I shall seek to obtain one.

It is nearly December now, and a second bottle has been obtained. And cellar temp is now 52ºF.

The fragrance remains “horizontal” and my cognate with Renner GV isn’t unreasonable. Zeltlinger Sonnenuhr does have a savory side, and a long-fermenter could easily take on the meadow-flower thing. But the basic structure is more vivid from this bottle, and its adamant grip gives a sort of rhetoric to the fruit. It has the Gesture-Of-Importance of the “GG” genre, and I don’t intend that to sound derisive. (It’s fine for important wines to taste important…) But if there’s one single element that makes this wine marvelous it’s an essential wildness, an almost feral vitality. It is unconcerned with politeness because it is busy being good. And it rattles things as it moves about the room, and it tangoes with your suddenly spinning palate.

Finally there’s this crazy butterscotch thing, like a perfect piece of Comté. This wine wasn’t babied along; I’m sure it was always willful and out of control and yet, it turned into a snorting noble beast, and I’m so glad I tasted it again, because it is a complete and total blast.

2019 Gewürztraminer Trocken

Johannes says: “Since my late teenage years I always had a secret love for good Gewürz’  that draws you in for more, which hasn’t been (and still isn’t) easy to find.

“I had a wish that I was finally able to fulfill myself, to plant Gewürztraminer in a good Mosel site with slate but also ample humus, fine-earth and water retention and to make the ‘hard to make’  elegant, dry, crisp and, yes, neither bitter nor fat nor overtly perfumed ‘Traminer.’ It took some learning and we are finally where we want to be with vintages 2019 and 2020. A great asset and help was [son] Sebastian with his Geisenheim training and his internship in Tramin proper.”

This wine is truly wonderful. If you’re looking for a Gewürz’ you could plausibly call “ladylike”—and please understand this doesn’t refer to the prevailing cliché of “feminine,” but rather just one single way some women can sometimes be—ladylike—then you have found your wine. If you enjoy the whole rose-and-lychee thing but don’t always like the sultriness (and high alcohol) (and sweetness) that often accompany them, this is your wine. It’s like a sorbet of lychee!

I’m stoked that Johannes plans to continue with this variety, because this vintage constitutes an achievement. To get to 13% alc in a dry Gewürz’ without finishing bitterness, and to combine the classic varietal profile with something almost sprightly, that is something very few people have done.

He wanted me to keep it for eight days open, but we were disobedient and drank some with dinner last night, and now we’re down to a quarter-bottle. “Tasting” it again, it’s less lacy and more overtly rose-like, but it’s still silvery and spectral for Gewürz’, and I’d imagine the 2020 is even more so.

2020 Riesling feinherb  + (and glug-glug-glug)

A charming fragrance is almost to-be-expected from this smart domain. It’s a Mosel template (slate/apple/lime/herbs) with some of the malic sprightliness I associate with Kinheim, where Selbachs have some land providing wines that go into blends such as this.

It’s no secret I find this amount of RS to be the platonic ideal of balance for most Rieslings, and if this wine doesn’t achieve “perfection,” it embodies that Ideal as well as any wine can, and poignantly in this instance, as it’s so “basic” and affordable.

Riesling can achieve the loftiest of resplendence and the noblest of purposes—some of them are reported on lower on the page—but if there is a scale of preciousness, defined by a feeling of life affirmation, then this wine is at its pinnacle. What a relief such a wine is in the world! What a friend it is to all who drink it! How happy the home that owns it! How reassuring to envision it there, waiting for you, as you walk in your door after a grumpy day and you need something to cheer you up.

Drink, and come again to life, to relief, to gratefulness.

2020 Zeltinger Himmelreich Riesling Kabinett Halbtrocken +

It is steadily excellent, with small variations based on vintage and more compelling variations based on vinification, specifically the proportion of Fuder to steel that goes into the cuvée. This feels like a larger proportion of wood (and the tertiaries and textures it brings), which would make sense in a year like ’20, with its neon green zing.

We have, as always, quince and ginger and lemongrass, and we have a bit of spiky jazz on the finish, but we also have fragrance and poise and intelligence, and a thrilling balance, a tautly stretched cable on which flavors quiver in a stiff wind.

If you know the en-bloc wine from the ANRECHT, you will see this wine is the germ of that one. They share a DNA, only that wine is a giant, and this is a little squeaky sprite. And we can really taste the dance of the two components, the suavity from the barrels and the little celery-leaf spark of green from the steel.

2020 Graacher Domprobst Riesling Feinherb “Alte Reben” ++

The back label indicates “Spätlese” along with feinherb

It is truly hard to fathom how a wine could combine such sophistication with such atavism, yet this (and its sister the Sonnenuhr Ur-alte Reben) do so in some incomparable way.

You have the pistachio crunch of Domprobst, all the sponti fragrance you could ever crave WITHOUT THE STINK, the herbs and oolongs and foresty green and all in a framework of determined grip and spice. The Sonnenuhr is more suave and light-footed; this boy’s wearing crampons.

It’s naked slate, the Nth degree of Mosel-ness and yet it isn’t even a tiny bit steely. It’s a pudding of primary rock!

I have to ask a question, me being me and all: Do we need wine to actually be drier than this? What if someone told you “I have an element that will add to the fragrance, bring more color to the flavors, extend the life of the wine, lower the alcohol, and make it more flexible at the table,” and you replied, “I don’t use additives in my wines.” And then this someone says—“It’s not an additive; it’s already in the wine.” Wouldn’t you be insane to refuse this???

2020 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Feinherb “Ur-alte Reben” ++

Back label indicates “Spätlese,” and alcohol is 12%

The parcel is called Kackert, and the (ungrafted) vines are truly ancient, most over 100, and the oldest date back to before planting records were kept at the estate. The idiom is to replicate the style of cellar work prevailing at the time—much as Loewen does with their “1896” (though Selbach’s done it for longer), which means ambient ferments (viz. yeast and temperature) in Fuder and aging on the primary lees until bottling.

The result is nearly indescribable, unless you’re willing to imagine an amalgam of verbena, Mirabelle-plum, “orchid” style oolong teas, wintergreen, and Cox’s Orange Pippin. You also need to surmise a creamy texture having nothing to do with whatever usually creates it. Here it is made by density of extract alone.

And yet when you get the wine on your palate, all that richness shimmers away into a tactile jab of pure slate, a thousand tiny needles of it, an acupuncture of terroir. I know of nothing else like it. And while this wine is always important, when it is great it is incomparably great, a glowing being that squares the circle between meditation and drinkability. Indeed it’s so drinkable you reach and reach for your glass, but when you actually have it in your mouth it stops you cold with its intricacy and its melody. You want to follow it, even if you lose the way, even if the world is darkening and the words of the poem dissolve on the page.

Because wine is a certain kind of gift. The painting you like holds still for you, and you can look as long as you desire; the music you play you can play again; the words on the page are there when you look again—but each sip of wine is like a note struck on a piano, it fades into silence as soon as you strike it. If you pursue that strange lost music you can enter an ecstasy of longing that feels a little like death. And that is where the music lives.

Returning to the prosaic … this is the best vintage since 2016, and while I love it with all my soul, my actual palate registers a tiny concern. The finish begins with the exotic echo of the mid-palate fruit-richness and then seems to solidify into a kind of parfait of slate, and after that, at the very end, there’s just the smallest pointedness. I’d exaggerate if I said it was “sharp” or had a “bite.” It’s probably the green element of ’20. And then that thing fades and you’re left with all the gorgeous warmth of the primary flavors. Which linger, by the way, ridiculously.

This was only apparent from the Jancis glass and when tasted outdoors (on a 30º evening), and it’s quite possible I imagined it. Just trying to hold my head above the haunting water.

2020 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Kabinett

I’m having A Moment.

I have a Mosel paradigm in the glass. And I sniffed it, and almost cried.

I love German Riesling in all its guises, but somehow it is the Mosel whose wines return me to Eden.

They’re saying the ‘20s are crisp and cool, and this one is like phyllo, or like croissant layers, a latticework of stones so slim and brittle they crumble if you stare at them hard enough. The sleek blue fruit of Wehlen skiffs over the top of the grainy slate. The acidity might make you notice your gums. It tastes like one of their stainless-steel wines. It blazes with vitality and transparency and candor.

I don’t know if I’d have selected it; that would have depended on how the other Kabinetts tasted. I almost never “rejected” a Selbach wine; I only sought to restrain the offering to a manageable size. But that doesn’t really matter here.

There is something about Mosel Riesling, when it is true and unadorned, that shows the world before it was corrupted. Going further, it seems to show oneself before we were corrupted by all the things that obtruded upon our basic decency. We don’t have to go to virtue, and we don’t even have to talk about “goodness.” We can pause at simple basic decency, and we can wonder that wines like these can remind us what that looks like, or looked like, before the world trampled it with its clamor, and twisted us into beings who would do almost anything to get the things we were so sure we needed to have.

On day-2 the wine is more overt; the NacNeil fresh and crisp glass makes it almost creamy, like mascarpone studded with cold blueberries. Still, it’s a wine of the sideways glance, aloof and suave, compelling you with its icy blue flame.

2020 Zeltinger Schlossberg Riesling Kabinett +

In my merchant days, we had Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Kabinett as an always-in-stock item, and I’d approach this wine hoping not to love it. Often I didn’t succeed, as Schlossberg is my favorite among the Zeltingen Crus, and one of my most beloved Mosel vineyards, period. So, okay, to the matter at hand. Now I can love it as much as I like.

It’s a classic Selbach Kabinett, which is to say it is balanced along feinherb lines, with sweetness so well integrated it feels invisible. It is invisible. The wine is mostly steel, or tastes that way, and it’s quite a portrait of the flavors of the site. These run to shade and green and leaf and lime. (This wine smells like plum blossoms on a peyote binge.) It’s more aloof than the clement yellow welcome of its neighbors, but for me it’s a refreshing glade away from the sun on an over-warm day.

All I know is it’s complex and delicious and articulate and it shows the difference between a “little” wine and a delicate wine, and why we should understand that, and learn to notice it, because believe me, it is a vanishing species.

2020 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Kabinett  +

Well I admit the aroma’s more enticing than the Schlossberg’s. Fair is fair. That fragrance is more singular but this one’s more tempting.

A little spritz here. Agreeably. Still on the dry side, but RS is at least a discernible player now. It’s surprisingly tensile and scrupulous. It is concerned with balance and posture, and it has a softer voice. And yet it has a classic slatey energy, and while it’s less particular than the Schlossberg, it is more discreet and classical.

The word “discreet” is subject to smithereens as the wine warms and breathes. These came from the fridge, but when I re-taste I’ll do it at cellar-temp. Meanwhile, first impression—the wines are equal in quality, and I happen to like Schlossberg more. But many of you will feel otherwise, as this is an especially vibrant and buzzing kind of classicism.

2019 Zeltlinger Schlossberg Riesling Kabinett  +

This ’19 is subtle and lovely, and tastes as it sometimes does in outstanding vintages, where the sexiest fruit went into the more “important” wines. Don’t mistake me, there’s nothing wrong with a quiet wine, and in my religion we worship inference, but you should anticipate flavors that wrap around you almost unseen. Maybe even unseeable. Seekers of the direct approach—Here I am! Here are my many flavors!—could be frustrated by this wine’s reveries and quietude.

This could simply be a phase. That second-year after the vintage is famously inexpressive. The bottle could be mute for a number of reasons. But I don’t actually find it “mute.” I think it is keeping its powder dry. Its length is sneaky—and if you really pay attention you’ll find a finishing cling you had little reason to expect. It’s a creature of deception, this wine; it only seems remote, but what it really is, is allusive. I wonder if it will be more overt over the days. I expect it will, though I do love it now.

Two days later I poured it into three glasses, my basic Spiegelau (from which is was matter-of-fact and fine), the MacNeil “crisp & fresh (from which it was overt and giddy and almost buttery), and finally the Jancis (from which it was searching and incantatory). In each instance the wine had awakened and yet remained introverted. Fine by me! Behind that shroud is a wonderful face.

A note on scores by Terry Theise

I disapprove of points. I don’t recognize measuring wines against a notion of “perfection,” I think it’s a fool’s errand to assign absolute value to an ephemeral impression, and the more precise a scoring system purports to be, the more it actually misleads.

That said, my mind forms hierarchies of its own volition, and special wines warrant special attention. So I’ll revert to my deliberately inexact system of plusses—one, two, or three—to recognize the most remarkable wines. My plusses are sort of like Michelin stars. One plus is a wine that stood out. Two plusses is a wine that made me stop and consider the depth of its beauty. Three plusses is a wine that tingles with greatness, and offers a moment of profundity. Feel free to superimpose whatever scoring system you deploy; the point-systems are harmful but the folks who use them aren’t evil, so if you want to conflate my three plusses with a scoring range that makes sense to you, be my guest.

Extracted with permission from Terry Theise’s Tasting Protocols.

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The unshowy, textured, utterly authentic wines of Selbach-Oster are the essence of the Mosel, says Terry Theise as he begins his three-part exploration of the estate’s latest set of releases. 

They’ll catch on, eventually, and sometimes. I think the moment of arrival was last summer, when the important German newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemein did something it almost never does, and devoted its wine column to a single producer—Selbach-Oster.

Johannes Selbach himself is a conspicuous sort of gentleman. He travels the world selling and promoting his wines, as his estate is sizeable by Mosel standards, and also Johannes likes to travel. Johannes’ wines, however, are the opposite of conspicuous. Though far from modest or retiring, they avoid all the gestures by which wines seek to attract attention. You and I know all too well what those gestures are, and how tiresome they have become.

I wouldn’t describe Selbach’s wines as “introverted” but I would call them interior, because they focus on texture and their north star is authenticity. I’ve drunk them in detail for nearly 50 years, and never had one I’d describe as “gaudy.” They are to my mind virtuosic, but there’s more than one expression of virtuosity. One way is, you play your instrument, and the instrument plays the music. The other is you move through the instrument like a ghost, and play the music directly.

I’m not sure I’d describe Johannes Selbach as “modest” but I’m very sure I’d describe him as self-effacing as a vintner. If he is any sort of personage in the wine world that’s more a matter of personal exposure and articulacy. But he doesn’t enact a visible imprint on the wines. When I taste them I feel like I’m inhaling an ether of pure undiluted Mosel-ness, and I know they’re Johannes’ wines but the man himself is off to the side.

A beacon of meaning

I’ve written much about this domain. They are a beacon of meaning to me in my wine life, and in my life as a whole. Much of what I’ve learned about honor, integrity, and authenticity, I have learned from this family, and these wines.

Among more prosaic (but no less important) considerations, Johannes Selbach was the first Mosel vintner who was able to solve the “sponti problem,” an issue in which ambient-fermented wines were often hidden behind stinky veils, and stubbornly unapproachable in their youth. This was exactly when I was trying to taste them, and not long after, it was when I was showing them to my customers, and while I knew (and argued) that it wasn’t a “flaw” it was certainly a nuisance. So at one point—it must have been around fifteen years ago—I asked Johannes whether there was any way to preserve the virtues of spontaneous ferments while reducing or eliminating those annoying early odors. He said something like “Let me work on that,” and within a few vintages the problem appeared to have been solved.

Tasting these little baby ‘20s, most of which are spontis, I was reassured and delighted to find all the things I love about that kind of wine. As will you. It’s helpful to lock these wines in as a paradigm of how the style should (and can) be, because believe me, you won’t need to travel far to find young Mosel Rieslings that hold you on the other side of a wall. At times I’m willing to wait (or to swirl the hapless wine for minutes on end), but sometimes it just pisses me off. I’m sure no grower intends to display contempt for his customers, but he is issuing a consumer product that isn’t ready to be consumed, and which is sometimes marred by truly objectionable aromas. When such growers say, as they sometimes do, “You pay this price now for something superior later on,” I want to ask Why should I pay that price?

So kudos to Selbach for solving the problem for us! Even the most militant sponti in this collection—the en-bloc bottling from Rotlay—is entirely beautiful and standing by to give youthful pleasure, if that’s how you wish to drink it.

Selbach-Oster red and rosé wines

2018 Spätburgunder

Limpid garnet, like a ripe-vintage Beaujolais. Fragrance is dusty and pretty from a Spiegelau (the large white-wine stem that’s actually better for light-bodied reds), and more precise and definitely pretty from the Jancis. But the palate is impressively charming from either glass!

It is not, however, merely charming. The wine has some “ideas.”

Johannes tells me: “It is grown partially in Zeltinger Himmelreich not too far behind the church in Rachtig. The other portion comes from Kinheim. Both have soils that are slate with loam and humus mixed in. The vines are a global “potpourri“ of German ( Marienfelder and some Geisenheim ) and Swiss clones.”

“Hand harvest of picture perfect fruit, grapes mostly destemmed, however about 15% were left with stems. The grapes underwent classic open top fermentation with punchdown of the cap. Transfer of the dry wine into mostly 3rd and some 4th year Francois Frères barriques to finish fermentation and undergo malolactic fermentation. Long ageing on the lees. Unfiltered. Obviously no chaptalization.”

The Jancis glass reveals some angles and corners and a spiciness that veers toward black pepper. Oxygen lets loose some tannin from both glasses. In both cases the fruit is morello cherry, with a little background funk from the Jancis and more grilled Portobello (with many shavings of a bold peppercorn, like Penja). It’s quite a shape-shifter, and if I say it’s “charming” you might receive it as firm and peppery—and vice-versa.

It is both ambitious and sensible; that is, it isn’t overly ambitious for its environment. Nor does it strut a lot of extraction and wood; it’s light but not slight. I’m curious to see whether the fruit moves forward or backwards over the next few days.

48 hours later there is discernibly more fruit, ie, oxidation seems to help the wine if fruit is what you’re after. Decanting might be useful. Structural elements remain much as before; if anything the wine’s a bit tougher than it first seemed. Johannes may be trying to respect the tensions of steep land and the lightness of the northerly latitude, while not surrendering to an assumption the wine should be slight and (merely) attractive. Of course if you want to make the Pinot Noir gods laugh, tell them your intentions!

But that’s not the end of the story. I hate discarding wine, and the 1-2 glasses worth left in the bottle sat in the cellar for two weeks, before I pulled it to supplement a dinner bottle we’d finished too quickly—oh yeah, that happens—and all this Selbach needed was to be drinkable. Right! Shall I tell you what happened or do you already know?

2017 Spätburgunder Trocken— glug-glug-glug?

Johannes must have been pleased with my report on the above (which I shared with him per his request for a quick comment), because he’s sent the ’17 now, which, if I tasted it before, I don’t remember. It’s unfiltered and shows it; it also has a riper fragrance with a fuller middle. It’s fleshier than the ’18, but by no means corpulent. It smells good, a true Old-World PN aroma.

I must say, this wine is excellent, and right out of the gate. You’ll have seen my tasting saga with the ’18, but this hits the ground running. It has truly lovely fruit! It’s sensationally limpid and charming. It’s almost too polished for my “glug-glug” thing, but it’s also addictively tasty, which counts for a lot in my world. Are we ready to cherish the virtues of “little” wines when they’re this delightful?

There’s material to “consider” in the fruit, if you want to, but I don’t discern anything I’d call Mosel-ness, unless it’s a lucidity often imparted by steep slopes, or steep-ish in this instance. Nah, it’s just a chipper sort of wine that comes to you tail-wagging and ready for a game. If we are too sophisticated to appreciate such wines, then shame on us, because we’re wasting our relationships to wine.

2020 Spätburgunder Rosé Trocken

Not that Johannes would ever pander, but <sigh> … it had to happen, right? What Christian Dautel calls “the dreaded rosé.” On the other hand, the option to make a rosé gives strength to the Spätburgunder, and people like rosé, and there are some good ones along the Mosel (Adam!), and why not? Plus I have to say—and I mean this as a compliment—this rosé isn’t especially well behaved. This could be because it was bottled quite early, before the end of that year, and sometimes such wines have a sort of frozen adolescence.

It’s light but not innocuous. Finishes with a lot of grip. Shows a chewy structure under a surprisingly restrained fruitiness. Has a side-swipe of funk, the way Heidi Schröck’s rosé also has, though here the fruit is more orthodox. From the middle to the back palate you can even refer to minerality. Any more firm and I’d be calling it “stubborn.”

I love that it doesn’t satisfy expectations! No ooh-la-la fruit; indeed nothing blatant about this wine at all. At first glance it’s a subtle, structured and vinous wine yet with a gliding kind of lightness. But the wine straddles a fence, and I wonder whether it would better occupy one side or the other; either go on and make it “charming” or go all out to make it as slatey and mineral as possible and trust that fruit will attend to itself.

Selbach-Oster Pinot Blanc

2019 Pinot Blanc Trocken

Tasted from an opened bottle (on the day it was opened) back in June, and it strikes me as a superb vintage of a really surprising success for them, and that’s in part because it’s not bone-dry, and because it combines a slatey twang with a remarkably deft use of wood. And in this case, a lusty fruit statement that’s also sea-salty and even seems to have a little sponti element. I have long thought this was among the world’s more interesting (and tasty) Pinot Blancs, much to my surprise (as Johannes won’t hesitate to tell you…) when I first tasted it in 2015.

2019 Pinot Blanc Reserve

It’s in a heavy “significant-looking” Burgundy bottle with a wax blob in place of a capsule. Nor does it say “Trocken” on the front or back labels.

I WISH THE BOTTLE WAS NOT SO HEAVY. IT DOESN’T NEED TO BE.

The wine is ambitious, and most of its ambitions are realized. I have the sense that my old pal Johannes wants to make his bucket-list wines now—the Pinot Noir, this, an orange wine he made a couple years ago, the upcoming Gewürztraminer … or maybe it’s the yawp of the young’uns and the envelopes they like to push. But I do know Johannes has a “thing” for big Chardonnays, to which this wine alludes.

Alludes, but doesn’t copy. It’s grown in the slatey Schlossberg, and it saw no new wood. It likes a round wide-ish glass. It has a charming fruit that’s slow to emerge. Put it this way: I had a 2018 St-Aubin Les Fionnes from Hubert Lamy last week, and that was good and this is better. It feints toward the smoky-oaky genre but keeps pulling back to a saltiness and structure girdling this subtle sweet-hay kind of fruit. I’d really like to make a shrimp risotto with a fresh stock from the shells and a few too many threads of saffron.

I’ll baby this for a few days and watch how it develops. Right now I’m feeling impressed with the audacity and generally happy with the booze, but I have a niggling sense that its reach exceeds its grasp. Tasted again—and very much enjoyed it with food—I do think it is—“ambitious”

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