2022s From Dönnhoff

I am painfully aware that Dönnhoff’s 2023s are busy entering the market, and yet here I am reporting on the ‘22s. Blame it on the logistics; the wines take forever to get to me, and when they do it’s usually part of a big tranche of samples, which I taste one estate at a time, and often for a week per producer.

But I set about neither to be au courant nor to be the “taster of record,” and I’m barely concerned with giving advice on what to buy. I just look at a group of wines and tease out whatever elucidation they offer. And so….

What happens when a stellar estate collides with a troubled vintage? The obvious answer is, it depends on the estate and on the vintage, but in this instance we have at least an illustration of a possible scenario.

In the case of Dönnhoff, it’s fair to say their wines have consistently been either very good, excellent, or superb over the many years I’ve known them. This is quite a lofty perch to occupy at all, let alone so consistently. And I’m also aware that duckling vintages have turned into swans over time (have you tasted one of their 2013s lately?) and that the bunch of 2022s I’m in the midst of tasting could easily be in a developmental trough of some sort.

With that and other qualifiers in place – not excluding the possibility I am simply mistaken – I think it’s fair to say the vintage falls into the “good-very-good-excellent” spectrum, that is, a notch below the usual level but still solid and sometimes beautiful. But having recently skimmed my way through a group of 2023s, that looks like a roaring good vintage that shows the “tingle” the ‘22s seem to be missing.

Every wine has been tasted three times and they’ve also been sipped as dinner was cooking, and drunk at the table with food. This is what I always do, but it seemed especially necessary with these wines, which didn’t always show well as tasting-samples.