Between Selbach-Oster and Merkelbach, it’s thirty seven wines. I’ma be busy for a while….
One thing is important to note. Selbachs are bottling samples in half bottles with screw cap. It makes economic sense, after all; much less wine going to waste or decaying in the full bottles, and of course zero chance of TCA. I have four cute little cases emptied out, and a cellar-table laden with wee little splits.
I bring it up only because these are not precisely the wines you would buy, if you bought them. In this early stage of their lives, the differences between the wines would be negligible or even imaginary; any distinction I fancy tasting is probably a placebo effect. But we do full-disclosure here, so I need to disclose the closures so that we’re on the record about what I’m tasting these frisky young wines from. Thus there may be an infinitely subtle effect tasting from screw-capped halves in contrast to cork-finished 750s of the actual wines.
To remind you: the Merkelbach wines are grown and made by Selbach now, using the brothers’ old protocols and methods, so as to preserve their original styles. I’ll taste them interchangeably in the flights where they belong, but do not forget they are stylistically apart from actual Selbach-Oster. Unless otherwise identified, the wines come from Selbach-Oster.
THE MANY FACES OF ZELTINGER SONNENUHR
If you know the estate, you know there are two crucial wines: The bloc-picked Rotlay (named after its cadaster) and the ur-Alte Reben, which hails from an ancient (well over 100) cadaster called Kakert. The two wines, if not fraternal twins (as I myself would argue) are at least first cousins.
There have always been Kabinett/Spätlese/Auslese, sometimes in gradations of ripeness within category. Recently a GG has joined the fray, and I grew interested how one vineyard could produce so many essentially different wines. If you taste the GG and the ur-Alte Reben side by side it is hard to infer they hail from the same piece of land. Indeed it’s hard to infer them coming from the same winery, even the same sensibility.
The official Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Einzellage is roughly 21 hectares, by no means gigantic for a single-site on the Mosel. The Selbachs own around 4.5 hectares, spread over 13-17 parcels, depending on whether you count Rotlay as one or subdivide it into its component parcels. The majority of Selbach’s holdings are in the lower part of the vineyard, which means closer to the Mosel, which means less wind and more humidity. The rest are mostly in the upper sections, with just a smattering mid-slope.
I was curious about the origin of the GG, as it would have to hail from a site where botrytis was rare, as this is considered unwelcome in a dry Riesling. In practice it’s a mélange of parcels, most commonly from cadasters called Kauenberg and (less often) Kierbet, but most intriguing, it can also hail from relatively young vines in the Rotlay, as well as from a sub-cadaster in Rotlay called Draht, and finally a cadaster called Eicht. These are predominantly mid-slope, or (let’s say) the upper parts of the lower slopes! So there isn’t a particular origin for the GG but rather a general sense of what sites will best deliver that “type” of wine.
It stands to reason that Kabinetts and “clean” Spätlesen will come from further up, from sites that were tenuously viable before climate change. Many years ago Johannes told me the family winced to produce a Kabinett from such a Grand Cru (which they did because it was a “stock-item” for their importer, who asked for continuity). The ’23 Kabinett, as you’ll see, is of a quality frankly ludicrous for that category, but there you go. The Germans are frequently taken to task for their “multitudes of bottlings,” but tell me, what else would you expect from such a close accord between vintner and vineyard? Seems to me if the sites are different the wines should also be different. I mean, one could make a case – admittedly a fatuous one – that the Chablis Grand Cru hill should all be just one vineyard. Too many names! No one is interested except geeks and nerds. But, you know….we respect France.
I found the Rotlay and the ur-Alte Reben to be gigantically fine wines, and curiously, at least on first pass, I thought the GG was relatively slight compared to the rest of that family. That was also my first impression of the ’22, but I later came around and could do so again – this is being written before my second tasting of the collection.
But this marathon shall start with a trio of weirdos, one of which is entirely new to me. (And by the way, I do believe there’s a Pet-Nat in the Selbach program, along with an orange wine and a non-alcoholic “beverage,” and Johannes did well to keep me away from them.)
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