SCHLOSS LIESER
2023
2021 “SL” Riesling Trocken
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I love it when the whole room smells like Mosel Riesling the very second you unscrew the cap. The wine itself smells rapturous, led by herbal aromas that suggest origins in Lieser itself.
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The palate – and this is the “acid-test” of these ‘21s (and the pun is definitely intended) – is both polished and aggressive. There’s no excess of sharpness in the tactile mouthfeel, but it’s also a wine that doesn’t give way, and that asserts the vintage briskness. It’s a snappy wine some could find cerebral, and of course I’m quite aware I’m tasting this as the 2022 is on the market, and the estate is unlikely to worry about how this cuvée might taste with years in bottle.
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That said, it’s one of the crisp ‘21s and if you like that style you’ll find plenty of class here. And you’ll be glad for the mid-palate accommodation to those of us who like this kind of wine to be at least a little juicy.
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And yet, after it was open for six days (and about two inches remained in the bottle, it presented with a fine snappy charm as an apero in the kitchen while we were prepping dinner. It didn’t gain “juice” as much as lose sharpness, but if it had been my first impression, this little note would read quite differently.
2021 “Heldenstück” Riesling Trocken +
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Heldenstück is a trademark for the village-wine from Lieser, as explained on the back label.
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Again, the aromas are really splendid, with a sort of determinedly precise insistence I also found in Willi Schaefer’s vintage.
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The wine is a crucial leap up from the SL, and is about as excellent as could possibly be fathomed for its vintage and quality level. It’s also a paradigm of what’s meant by “mineral” in wine descriptors.
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Specifically, what this wine carries with it is rich and tactile texture, with the full flavor of slate expressing as a categorical extract, so that this isn’t something one infers because one is such an imaginative taster; this is there.
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Yet we register extract as the peal of a bell made from crushed shale. We don’t “taste” it discretely as we would fruit, yet it inhabits the wine entirely with its chiseled generosity. It rewards attention; it isn’t a casual drink, even with its modest status as a “village” wine. Honestly, I want to give everyone a glass and tell you, this is what we love Riesling for, because the beleaguered variety is forever misunderstood.
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It is a wine evidently without “fruit” and I’m also not sniffing any flowers of which I am aware; nor do I glean spices or even the implied florality of oolong teas. What this is, is a riot of salts and fennel and petrichor that’s shockingly generous and doesn’t yield an inch – a little creature with all of 12% alc and more flavor than many, many wines of greater ostensible “richness.”
Standing ovation for this quietly spectacular wine.
2021 Goldtröpfchen Riesling
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The back label tells us it’s feinherb (and hails from Piesport). The capsule indicates VDP Grosse Lage.
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I applaud Thomas Haag for downplaying that this wine is not dry. In many ways I wish he didn’t even indicate “feinherb” because my (certainly inane and definitely unfashionable) view is that these things don’t actually matter. The taste of the wine matters.
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And this tastes very good, and I tend to be cool toward this vineyard, or more accurately I am wary of its excessive stature. (I imagine there are perhaps 5-7 hectares of true Grand Cru, and the rest is relatively “easy” Mosel wine that doesn’t stab and jab but gives relatively opulent exotic fruit with a wrap-around structure less challenging than, say, Ritsch or Domprobst.)
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It’s very good wine. It’s ideally balanced, has a fine salty length, a keenly expressive finish suggestive of nightshades and satsumas, and I appreciate that it avoids the usual “Mosel-easy-listening” so common to this appellation. I like its pungency, and its tomato-leaf resinouslness. It’s a fine glass of wine, and don’t worry that it doesn’t happen to scratch my particular Mosel itch.
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Next time it showed a kind of underripeness registering as herbaciousness, that also thrust the sulfur and phenolics forward. It remains pleasantly salty, but empty the bottle when you open it.
2021 Niederberg-Helden Riesling +
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Again, back label says feinherb and identifies Lieser, and the capsule shows VDP Grosse Lage)
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Is anyone else making serious wine from this vineyard? I didn’t know it until I tasted Thomas’s wines, and I’m sad at having missed out. It seems to be a wonderful site.
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And this is a screaming good wine. It’s the diametric opposite of the Goldtröpfchen; it’s all thrust and chisel and knife-edge and it is definite in all the ways the last wine was inferential. It has the wild-herbal element seemingly a site-signature, and it’s so sauvage it almost leaves Riesling behind and becomes a crazed radishy and nettle-y being you’d think was Greek, or Sicilan. The ’21 sharpness is exciting here – because it’s a matter of mints and not of excess acidity – and I adore its loony energy.
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Nor have I had many Mosel wines I’d describe as “peppery,” but this has a mizuna snap and would certainly clear your sinuses if necessary. I need to learn more about this vineyard….
2021 Juffer Riesling
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feinherb, and Brauneberg, and VDP Grosse Lage
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The first wine to show a sponti shroud.
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Juffer makes wines you don’t so much drink as bite into, as though they arrived on earth as solids and haven’t entirely melted. Here, along with the obdurate sponti notes, are the first phenolics I’ve seen in this collection.
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I see what wants to emerge, and I remember that this was my favorite among the ‘20s, but this wine is dancing on my toes a little. Juffer is usually a creature of pear but this one if like a quince, both fascinating and not quite edible. If the wine is just slow to unfurl I’ll know when I taste it again (and again, and again) but for now it feels, at first glance, like a misstep. And I am very willing to be wrong. The empty glasses smell good!
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The second tasting shows a more tangible aftertaste, and a nice one, but there’s still a peculiar scrim, a gauze between palate and wine that’s odd for this usually expressive terroir. There’s an indirect substance here yet it doesn’t register as discrete flavor. Hmmm.
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Tasting it for the fourth time now, six days open, having sipped it in the kitchen last evening, it has yielded yet is still curiously “quiet” both for Brauneberg and for Haag’s home terroir. My gut sense is there was a “weather-event” confined to Brauneberg at some point in the vintage, but this is only a wild guess. Though improved, it remains atypically graceless for a Schloss Lieser wine.
2021 Goldtröpfchen Riesling Kabinett
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The usual explications apply!
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This has a markedly paler color than any of the previous wines. At fridge-temp (around 40º) it’s markedly salty and relatively soft, even as cold as it is. The sweetness balance appears to be ideal. Acidity is not a problem.
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Aromas are refined and the palate has a bounce the feinherb was missing. It’s a pleasing Kabinett and a true Kabinett, with barely perceptible sweetness and a springy high-dive energy. I realize the “softness” I referred to was a distortion brought about by the excessive sharpness of so many ‘21s, because this wine is by no means soft. It has the wrap-around character of the site but it’s also a fun thing to drink.
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And that in turn is because it’s a worthy thing to study, this ostensibly everyday wine. We are duly intrigued.
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It’s another wine that doesn’t benefit from being open over many days. Make some food that will talk to the wine’s peachy charm and drink to the bottom of the bottle.
2021 Niederberg-Helden Riesling Kabinett +
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They apply again.
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I seem to vibrate to this vineyard. The fragrance of this little wine is entirely captivating. And at first glance this is simply perfect Mosel Kabinett. “Perfect” is a loaded word, obviously, but how else do you convey the surety that a wine presents as though it were carefully ordained to be exactly as it is?
When writers claimed the ‘21s harkened back to a time of “classic Kabinetts” this is the sort of wine they meant. Geezers with long memories might shed tears of relief that such a thing hadn’t gone extinct after all. A wine like this is like a lullaby sung to you on your deathbed, that steeps you in the freshness of your childhood again.
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Is it edgy? Yes it is, but it’s basically even tempered. Brisk? Sure, in a refreshing way. It’s also interesting, because its serene balance lets you study its salty herbal depths. It’s also modest and unassuming, even while it spins out its lovely calculations of nuance and flavor. A leafy and lovely iteration of Riesling.
2021 Juffer Riesling Kabinett +
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You know the drill….
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What superb Kabinetts these are! It isn’t easy to resist the urge to pimp them up to get “scores,” but these wee ones come at you giggling and entirely happy in their giddy skins.
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This has all the sinewy chew of Juffer and is (yet) another Kabinett with no perceptible “sweetness” (and which just might prompt a guy to wonder why German Riesling should be made any other way….) Again, we deal with not-quite-ripe pear, and with tapioca pudding, and with coconut milk, and with a fervid crunch of mineral, and with a finish that sits on its knees and begs you to sip it again.
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The honor of a lost art, that’s what’s on display here. That, and a reminder that sublimity has nothing to do with dimension, because these Kabinetts are as glowing as wine can ever be.
2021 (Graacher) Himmelreich Riesling Kabinett
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The front label says just “Himmelreich,” but there’s also a site by that name in Zeltingen, though this estate has no land in it.
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This is straight down-the-middle Mosel Riesling, perfect in its way. Parcel location is crucial here, as the hillside (which is unstable and which therefore had no Flurbereinigung) has steep sections and rather substantial flat and nearly flat sections. The wines from the latter can be wonderful; the soil is crumbled and such “feinerd” gives wines with their own finesse, and with more moderate acids, welcome in a year like ’21.
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Perfect in its way, if I had to guess it blind I’d rummage through my mind eliminating what it couldn’t be, but I don’t know where I’d arrive. The wine is snappy, sweetness is moderate (as good as invisible, in fact) and acidity makes a statement. When I taste again I’ll place it first in the Kabinett flight.
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It only needed time, since the second look is far more expressive, manifestly mineral, with available fruit and still ideal balance. I’m glad I babied it along, as it enacts all the density of extract and springy freshness we loved – or loved – about this genre and this place.
2021 Domprobst Riesling Kabinett +
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As before, so again.
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There’s more character here. The wine is edgy, angular, and seems to be a wee bit sweeter; it shows the exotic fruit, Cox’s orange pippin note (as opposed to the mutsu note of Himmelreich), the typical pistachio flavor, and greater torque. Even among the Grosse Lagen this is a pinnacle, and even this little fella does it full justice.
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Domprobst is antithetical to those who want Mosel Rieslings to charm them. Of course there are fruit-lavished wines from here – Schaefer’s Spätlese #5 is aglow and magnificent with fruit – but for me the essence of this vineyard is a challenging complexity and an insistent minerality.
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Sometimes slate is so expressive it veers off into resins and pepper, as it does now. Acids are vivid but not punishing. Still, with that said, it’s one of those ‘21s I can’t see hanging on to. Purists might yelp “What do you mean; this wine will last for decades!” Which, yes, it will, but that leaves an unanswered question: Okay but what will it taste like?
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I am less wary when I taste it again. Acid and phenolics are present but fruit is more protective and gives me hope for a tasty evolution.
2021 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Kabinett ++
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More sponti than the Graachers, below which is a fervently expressive Weh-Son with all the “blue” flavor that characterizes this Cru. Blue is just my image tone for it, or perhaps a little impulse of synesthesia, but this, for all its renown, is quite a particular slice of land with flavors all its own.
This flyweight Riesling is carrying a megaton of mineral in its satchel, and in this case the structure is less aggressive and more accommodating, so that the crushed-scree mid-palate is almost shocking in a wine that seems to want to snuggle you. Yet the sweetness is so subtle as to render the wine as-good-as feinherb.
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Rieslings like this are entirely miraculous, and nothing else in the world is like them. As weighty as a wisp of tow, the volume of flavor and the depth of intricacy it shows truly boggles the mind. Nor do we see such wines much any more. There’s more overt juju these days, juice and fruit and the pliancy of body that goes along with them.
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I’m remembering a wine that deeply inspired me – a 2008 Kanzemer Altenberg Kabinett from von Othegraven, that also seemed to encapsulate every single great thing about Riesling in something small enough to put in your pocket but intense enough to drink from a spoon. This wine is another such, and for all I’ve inveighed against the over-hyping of the ’21 Mosel vintage, this wine justifies the hype.
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It behaves more like a wine to study (and wonder over) than a wine to wet the whistle with. It didn’t sing in the kitchen before dinner, and I hated to see it go to waste not “showing” well. With air it started to show a nuance of Taiwanese Yushan oolongs, for which obscure association I must beg your indulgence. It’s true, though.
2021 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese ++
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This is my second time tasting these wines in detail at home, and I scanned through a bunch of them when I visited the estate. Something I’m starting to glean is a sense of a singular otherworldliness of fruit in Schloss Lieser wines of a certain ripeness and sweetness. It’s the draping of a garment knitted by a celestial being of some type, or a nature of flavor that seemed to have dropped from the stars and not risen from the earth. It begins to be present here, though the wine is extremely firm and has its “structure” on full display.
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In effect it is the Kabinett with more flesh on its bones. It takes those virtues and adds the sauce that finishes the dish. Atop the dramas of slate we now see a meyer-lemon tang and a Cox’s orange pippin element, that malic grasping at the richness of pitted fruits.
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But there’s no accounting for the sense of divinity this wine starts to hint at. In a way it’s held in check by the superbly firm structure, but the surmise is there among all this filigree articulation.
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Is it a “better” wine than the Kabinett? In a way yes, in another way no. It adds fruit, and a little sweetness; there’s “more” taking place here. But the adamant foundation and mineral expression is no greater than its kid brother’s. That said, the added ripeness and fruit expression send this wine veering off into the siblime.
2021 Niederberg Helden Riesling Spätlese +
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From Lieser, of course, as the helpful back label clarifies.
Let’s flip the script, shall we?
We uproot ourselves from charm of fruit. We cross a border into a new place, of grasses and herbs and resins. Of iron, even. The buildings aren’t as tall here. Something soberer is in the air.
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In a sense the wine is simpler now, yet it’s also more fluid, and that supple juiciness is an attractive counterpoint to the matter-of-factness of an un-mown field. In contrast to the bright smiles of Sonnenuhr and Domprobst, we have a resting face, not awfully stern but definitely calm.
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And decidedly dry. And in a way I find fascinating, unlike the usual Mosel parameters. Structurally yes, but essential flavor, no – or put better, it presents a new way to view “Mosel” that has few cognates I’m aware of.
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The tertiary finish – that is, the lingering of the umami – is savory enough to be confused for some rogue Grüner Veltliner, until the obdurate skeletal backdrop confuses you even more. I sense this will locate its guide-beam of Moselness with air, and we’ll see if any of this holds water the next time I taste it.
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Well, yes and no. Each thing is exaggerated with repeated tasting, both the essential Mosel-ness and also the particular wildness. It’s an angular, piquant creature who seems content to intrigue us and indifferent to whatever sense we might (or might not) make of it.
2021 Juffer-Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese
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Brauneberger, of course, as the back label makes clear.
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Fascinating: This is the second wine to be what we’d all call “backward” and the first was another Brauneberger.
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At this point I can only truthfully say, the wine is firm, tight and barely yielding, showing a surmise of vineyard character and then only when I cajole it, and showing markedly aggressive acidity even in the context of the year.
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I’ll be glad to see the wine unfurl itself, and I’ll tell you of my joy and relief if and when it does.
Well, it has a lot of muscle for this vineyard. It’s more open but not exactly open. Brauneberg is comparatively four-squared this time around – not that the wine is mundane; far from it. The aromas are captivating, and the wine may just be scrambling to catch up. The finish, also, suggests a many faceted complexity may be lying in wait.
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Tasting it now for the fourth time, it does an unusual about-face, entering the palate seeming dry but then finishing sweet, the opposite of typical Riesling behavior. I acknowledge the many attractive facets here, yet the gestalt is misshapen in some way.
2021 Niederberg Helden Riesling Auslese ++
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The rapture of ’21 is found in wines like these. I haven’t tasted many of them, but they’re out there. In essence it seems to entail both latest-possible harvest and squeaky-clean botrytis. A rare kind of wine is thus achieved, showing an acme of sublime fruit underlined by a fetching malty botrytis, and showing a gossamer watercolor transparency.
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It feels intensely poignant, this little ray of sublimity against the odds. It’s not without turbulence and trouble, this wine; there’s quite a cut of acidity to contend with below the fructose. And if one wishes for a certain “luxury” in an Auslese, a wine like this could be too delicate, it could seem perhaps too salty, it could finish too dry.
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I could also be distorting the wine’s character, but it isn’t easy tasting a lot of ’21 Mosels as a group (except for estates like Selbach and Loewen whose wines were less insistently acid-driven) because after the 5th or 6th one, the palate is crying for relief from the growing sharpness. I can spend all day tasting Champagne (and even want to keep drinking it in the evening) but some of these ’21 Mosels are like scratching an itch until it bleeds. But my god, that fragrance!
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The final time I tasted it I did so following the Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spätlese, and for all its added ripeness, this wine presents drier than that one. I think I’d rather see it at the table than as a wine of meditation.
2024
2022 “SL” Riesling Trocken
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Pungent Mosel aromas with an overtone of the “animal” substrate of some ‘22s. The palate is fervidly coniferous, and better balanced than was the ’21. It leads with mid-palate juiciness and the sparks of mineral fly around that. In essence it’s what an elite producer shows as the “basic estate” wine in a vintage that had, or seems to have had, some issues at this level.
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Or maybe the issue is me. I’ve spoken to colleagues who agreed the wines are uneven from grower to grower, and also within estates, but the critical “establishment” hasn’t said a peep about it. One can also ask how much it all matters. The everyday wine is just that; something to drink and not examine so awfully closely. (Though when the wines are good the growers will tell you how their everyday wines are the calling-card for the domain, and they have to be excellent.)
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It’s in my nature to taste all-the-way-in. If you’ve ever made your own chicken stock, there’s a point while it’s reducing that it smells almost “fruity,” an appealing aroma that some Pinot Blancs approximate, but you may also have noticed that if you over-reduce it, it acquires a fragrance they call “tacky,: which I interpret as an animal funk that disturbs the stock. Some of the ‘22s I’m tasting have what feels like (maybe) 10% of this aroma – and some have more – not enough to ruin them but enough to intrude on what you hoped would be pristine. I wanted it here, because I appreciated the herbal and mineral flavors redolent of the Lieser terroir, and I also appreciate the pleasant texture, compared to the sharp-toothed ’21s.
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I feel like a pill at times like this, but it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
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I mean, unless it does. We drank a glass last evening while dinner was cooking, and not surprisingly, it was perfectly fine. Which means one of two things: Either the wine is all right if you’re not micro-examining it, or it had some sort of “issue” it needed to shake off, and air was the answer. I am tasting it again as I write, and it seems to be a little of both; it gets better with air, and if you taste it “under the microscope” you may discern an earthiness.
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It kept improving over four “tastings” and five days, and that needs to be said. But most people will open and drink it within an hour or so. I devote so much time to a “basic” wine of relatively little consequence, because as a merchant I was an insane person to ensure that this category of wine was slam-it-down good at the very least, and punching above its weight at best. These little wines matter.
2022 “Goldstück” Riesling Trocken
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It’s the village-wine of Piesport. The initial aromas are funky but the palate is on the money. It has the clement spherical approach of most Piesporters, and is balanced on the pliant side. That said, the wine is yielding but by no means soft.
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Most of that “funk” is just the sponti burp, and as this fades the pieces of the wine are more transparent, especially the stealthy acidity that leads into a rather phenolic finish. That occurrence seems ineluctable to wild ferments made in stainless steel, and the prevailing cliché is of course – “you have to give them time.” Which you do. Which I’m willing to do, because I know what’s on the far side. But which I wish I didn’t have to.
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But forget my carping. This wine is a complete success, with drive and torque and wonderfully, with steel sparks of freshness and mineral that truly overcome the Piesport tendency to sultriness.
A word about Piesport. This isn’t an original idea, I don’t think, but it does seem that maybe 10-15% of Piesport is actually “GG” quality, and the rest is entirely honorable village-wine, such as this happy baby. I’d love to see those truly superb parcels sold under their cadaster names and let the village wines be called “Goldtröpfchen” if they must. Sorry to obtrude with my grumpy notes, especially when this wine is so excellent. I love its zip and dryness, even if it doesn’t really say Mosel to me.
2022 “Heldenstück” Riesling Trocken +
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The village-wine of Lieser. I barely knew Lieser before I started tasting Thomas Haag’s wines, and now I’m seriously stoked to know it, because it’s not just a variant on the theme of slate; it is something quite different, something almost other. Sniffing this wine the first things I receive are more expressive of Grüner Veltliner than Riesling, and Lieser appears to contribute this wildly herbal profile to the Mosel family. It’s as if a classroom were all writing the same text, but the student called “Lieser” was the only left-hander.
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At times Mosel wines feint toward the Nahe, but when they do it’s usually a question of exotic fruit. Here it’s a panoply of everything else. This masterly wine – and wow, it is really good, is making me think of the gaunt, ferrous notes of the GG Burgberg, which (guess what?) also references primary-rock grown GV. I don’t think I have taken leave of my senses….
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Not only could this wine not be any better, this entire genre of wine couldn’t be any better. It’s perfectly balanced, both dramatically complex and eminently drinky, full of originality and quick-witted charm. At this mid-range level, what more can you ask but that the wine goes down easily and is wildly entertaining as it does? As it takes on air, a wild-scallion note arrives, and the balance of this impeccably dry wine is not perturbed by the stealthy few grams of RS I believe I am sensing. Sure, the finish is a little gritty, but it’s the soft phenols we tasted in the 2020s and not the sushi-knife sharpness of many ‘21s.
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Applause!
2022 Goldtröpfchen Riesling GG
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It seems otiose to remark about the sponti aroma, as all the wines have them, but if you open a bottle and I didn’t warn you, you might well think “WTF.”
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As this tends to retreat within 2-3 minutes, I’ll only make a point of it when it’s especially stubborn. What lies in wait here is a classic site aroma of caramel, butterscotch, tangelo and verbena, with little to no overt slate discernible. Yet a kind of pulverized mineral appears on the palate – and the palate benefits greatly from it – along with a firmness the aromas didn’t foretell.
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There are sub-sections in this (way too large) site that act more like typical Mosel Rieslings, but as a rule Goldtröpfchen is the Mosel wine for people who don’t really like Mosel wine. To me it usually tastes like someone poured 20% of Forster Ungeheuer into it, it’s so (relatively) leathery and sultry. But there you go; I am a self-admitted extremist where Mosel Riesling is concerned. I want it screaming with slate.
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This is an excellent, stylish and elegant wine. It’s graceful and balanced, with inferences of salts and mineral, and it follows a consistent pattern wherein Thomas Haag makes a gentlemanly wine from this Cru. I respect and admire it, and that is not damning with faint praise. The wine does a thing that’s hard to do, and it “drinks well.” For the kind of severity I look for, the bottlings from A.J. Adam come closer to scratching my odd little itch. But this wine offers a lot to appreciate, even with its more spherical form. I have a furtive and quite rebellious notion that this wine, among all of them, would benefit from Fuder.
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Tasting again, that Fuder idea seems less fanciful. The wine almost alludes to it, and it has a few edges that could do with a little filing-off.
2022 Juffer-Sonnenuhr Riesling GG
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The aromas are warm and creamy to start. Cox’s Orange Pippins and ghee. (“Pippins and Ghee” sound like the names of a ventriloquist and his dummy….) The palate is also on the stern side, and I wonder if I’m having one of those sad-palate days.
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Then the aromas seem to cool down, to focus, to show the ineffable class of this supernal vineyard. Slate arrives, along with a lovely note of unripe pear, or even Asian pear – and yes, an “unripe” aroma can indeed be lovely in its ethereality and suggestiveness. The palate, at least right now, is stiffer than I’d like, because it seems oblique to Juffer-Sonnenuhr’s nature to field a wine this ascetic.
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I tasted this and the above Himmelreich yesterday and was confused by my impressions, so much so that I thought my palate might be somehow compromised. We’d had a pretty full-throttled curry the evening before, but any after-effects ought to have subsided nineteen hours later, or? So I approached the wines today in a hopeful frame of mind. And here, at least, that hope was partly justified. This wine is, I’d say, determinedly earnest, but at least it isn’t crabby. It smells lovely, and there’s a mid-palate fruit calling out as though from a small distance – but at least I can hear it. The grace of the Cru is also apparent.
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I won’t go so far as to say that super-dry wines are perhaps not this estate’s “thing,” but I will say, with great happiness and relief, that they have really taken a stand on the feinherb category, and they are – to my taste – markedly more successful there.
2022 “SL” Riesling (feinherb)
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“Feinherb” only appears on the back label, though admittedly the main label doesn’t say “Trocken.” I thought this would improve on the dry wine, and it does. I won’t keep litigating my insistence that this is the perfect idiom for a balanced, flexible Riesling, but there are simply more facets here.
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In my dotage, I have less and less appetite for very sweet wines. I like them the way they were before; racy and apple-sharp, so that the sweetness felt both necessary and inevitable and not like a surfeit of icing on one’s cake. Most often I find what I thirst for in wines like these, and in sweeter wines that don’t taste“sweeter.” I am at home here.
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To be fair, this doesn’t feel as lacy as the dry wine; it is more of a piece. I like the cherry blossom thing the dry wine didn’t (couldn’t) have, but the dry wine was more articulated than this one. I grant you that. But this one just tastes better.
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Tasted three times now, it is more than a trifle but doesn’t warrant much “study.” It’s a fairly simple wine that slips down easily. (I wonder what it would do to those shrilly dry GGs with a small percentage in the blend….?) Blasphemy!
2022 Juffer Riesling (feinherb) +
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Full name on the back label.
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Compared to many of the other great Mosel vineyards, Brauneberger Juffer is a scruffy little boy. It’s a rebellious, obstreperous sort of creature and when it isn’t working it can seem merely surly. So what makes it work? Concentration, for one. At times it needs sufficient sweetness, but when this is absent it needs enough fruit and extract to manage its muscularity. Otherwise it is a snarly unripe pear, a risk that inheres to the dry styles.
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This wine is close to perfect but it takes its time getting there. Some of it is (again) the sponti thing – actually most of it is that – and some of it is a first impression that seems lumpen, because the fruit is suppressed by the yeasty funk. When this retreats, we can see the essential wine, and while it is surprisingly adamant in the context of ’22, it finally attains a sort of command; it starts to taste like a not-quite-ripe pear sauteed in ghee and sprinkled with Kandy spice mix such that the result is more savory than sweet.
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It may land on your palate with a fist-like thump, but it peals into overtones more suggestive than it first appears. The wine is cunning, strong, determined, and ultimately, fantastically balanced. Put it this way; a couple earlier vintages were “perfect” out of the gate, and this one needs a bit of cajoling. But what awaits you is another wine that extends the conceptual possibilities for “Mosel” wine while staying firmly planted in the classical. I’d buy this by the case.
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Repeated tasting (and sipping) haven’t changed my mind. But alas I feel I must ask – for what kind of person is this wine not dry enough??? I find it a well balanced wine with nothing standing out as “residual sugar.” I’ve been at this for 45 frickin’ years and my palate has changed in many ways – but not this one. To insist on anything drier than this isn’t so much “purism” as masochism.
2022 Goldtröpfchen Riesling (feinherb)
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Suspicion of cork here. It’s a problem when one’s wines are so transparent; every little problem is made clearer. Will taste again tomorrow.
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Have done so now – and no cork. I put a neutral stopper in the bottle, so perhaps this was a bit of smudge from a less than perfect cork. The wine is as expected, with the dispersed structure and inchoate minerality of Piesport, but the wine is balanced and pleasant to drink. The fruit is bright but not gaudy, and the wine has lift and agility.
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It’s friendly and clement and one’s glad to be sipping it.
2022 Niederberg Helden Riesling (feinherb). Glug-glug-glug! AND - +
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Either ’22 was a super year for this vineyard, or I’m starting to grok it, or both, but whatever it is, this wine just rocks. The aromas are fervent and herbal and wonderfully wild, and the palate is splendidly pixilated and intricate, playing variations of salts and gorse and (even) garrigue and ginger, all in a texture that screams to be swallowed. Am I (again) betraying my preference for the feinherb category? Could be, and what of it! So many times – many, many times, this is the glowing core of Riesling, where it is happiest, where its many beauties are culminated, and where it is at home.
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And I say this as a lover and frequent drinker of all manner of dry Rieslings, and these are sometimes transporting.
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Our friend here is so spicy and so herbal and so toasty-salty that it is effectively “dry” as any sensible person would receive it. And it is the wine of requited love, or a perfect day for your hike, of a carbonara you cooked perfectly, of a piano in tune, of each thing that is pitch-perfect, a baby who sleeps through the night, a friend who thinks you’re funny, a car that seems to obey you, a photo you shot in perfect light that only lasted a few seconds. A beautiful bird who visits your yard. A dream that makes you happy for hours and hours. Yes, all that, in a wine that’s not in the least “pretty” but that exhales its own singular, pure perfection.
2022 (Brauneberger) Juffer Riesling Kabinett (+)
Cheesy sponti notes at first. To repeat – this isn’t a FLAW, but it is an element that affects the drinker’s experience. (Maybe the naturalistas will embrace it? Considering the many foul things they seem to forgive….) But here the problem seems to be cork. Will put in a neutral stopper and taste again tomorrow.
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Okay this is one of those utterly damnable wines with a cork so slight that it’s next to impossible to I.D. it positively. But something obtrudes upon the pristine, though you could “taste through” it if you had to. And I’m going to do something I haven’t done since this website began: Hedge a “plus.” Because I think I can tell how good this wine is, but the pall of TCA has it, and me, in a grumpy mood.
2022 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Kabinett
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Some color here, not alarming but noteworthy. The fragrance is – big surprise – super fine, with more herbal green notes than might usually be found. The wine is so “high-toned” as to feel a little constricted, but air usually un-clenches this kind of wine.
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In fact it feels (again) impeccable; it leads by the impression of acidity rather than RS, though I think some of the brisk attack is a temporary expression of SO2.
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But this is such a curious (and beautiful) wine; it has the gossamer Wehlen affect but it has the definite and positive herbal orchid-like substrate of Zeltlinger Schlossberg, which is to say I’ve tasted few Wehleners like it. I adore its essential racy dryness, and I appreciate its angularity, though I don’t know if that is inherent to the wine, or just an infantile phase. Still, who’d ever tasted such a lime-drenched wine from this vineyard? It ain’t me, babe.
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Tasted again after sipping a glass one evening; it is a very high-toned wine, one of those that plays notes only dogs can hear. It comes near to a symmetry of extremes such that acid and sugar are yelling at equivalent volume, but they haven’t formed a chord. Of the many things I appreciate about it, none are what I’d call sensual. The fragrance is enticing, and I don’t object to a wine that’s like a theory of beauty, so if I say the wine is “very fine indeed” you’re welcome to infer that I think it’s too fine – but is there such a thing as too fine? Especially in a world where so many things aren’t nearly fine enough??
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Let’s just say it’s a pensive, introverted wine (with rather a jolt of acidity) and leave it there.
2022 (Piesporter) Goldtröpfchen Riesling Kabinett
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Full-on orange blossom now. I don’t know whether it’s fructose adding to the GG fragrance or if it’s a different parcel; even the color is paler.
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The palate has a decent amount of grip, and it’s more pithy than the GG – which makes sense. The higher-acid lot would receive RS, and this wine seems to have vivid acidity, though at this stage it’s hard to parse the distinction between sulfur sharpness and actual acidity. The vintage tendency toward phenolic finish actually complicates the issue.
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But not too much. Everything about this wine makes sense in its contexts. It’s brisk, lively PiesGold, full of passion-fruit, salted caramel and pears sauteed in butter. The aromas are superbly focused and the wine justifies its exotic fruit, and it’s no one’s fault but mine that I’m an asshole who wants every Mosel wine to be Graacher Domprobst or Thörnicher Ritsch.
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I’m serious about this. I cling to my paradigms. I seldom find this vineyard to give what I envision as “Mosel” wine, though of course it does – in its way. This is an entirely tasty and successful Kabinett with a lot to recommend it (especially the finishing saltiness) and you’re welcome to reject my subjectivities.
2022 Niederberg Helden Riesling Kabinett
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This is a confusing wine. It has underripe flavors and also fragrances of celeriac and manifold “green” elements. Honestly, it’s almost ladybuggy in that uniquely metallic way. If they said it was the first wine harvested, I’d understand. Considering the successes of the GG and feinherb, this comes as a bit of a shock. The Spätlese is a highlight of the vintage, but something here is amiss.
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But say you’re one of those people who doesn’t perceive pyrazine. For you, this is a tight little Kabi that’s maybe a little too cool. I don’t like these flavors unless I seek them out, I.e., when I’m in the mood for that experience. I’d rather it stayed well clear of my Riesling Kabinetts.
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Subsequent tasting(s) reinforce my first impression.
2022 (Piesporter) Goldtröpfchen Riesling Spätlese
This is now four iterations of PiesGold. What can we infer?
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While I wait for the answer to that question, what we have here is the best wine of the quartet. I’m certain it has higher RS than the Kabinett, but it works drier in every structural (and organoleptic) parameter; what RS there is feels fleeting; the wine pulls inexorably toward a dry core, and while it’s no secret (by now) that I find the fruit of PiesGold to be overly gaudy, this wine comes close to justifying it. That is because there is a pith here, an underlying core of focus that makes for a tangible structure. And even below the generous sweetness, you’ll taste an urgent core that feels dry at its base.
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It’s just that point-counterpoint, that debate among elements, that “dialectic” if you will, that was always cited as the essential principle of German Riesling, back in the foggy depths of history when this type of wine was common. (Not this quality, but this idiom.) In those days the best “sweet” wines were snappy and crisp and the sweetness was more of a gelato and less of the cake icing. This lovely and commendable wine is a trip in the Wayback Machine.
2022 (Lieserer) Niederberg Helden Riesling Spätlese +
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Here’s another Spätlese that feels effectively dry. It isn’t, of course; it’s just a cunning and unerring sense for dialogue, for an uncanny balance that takes place when both sides are heard. Tasted, in this case.
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The glorious wildness of the site is on full yelping display here, but what really elevates the wine is an almost divine sense of sublime balance. You want to declaim: This! Is! Spätlese! But even so, the new climate era shows itself in a finish that doesn’t quite relinquish its sweetness. But even saying that, it’s like one of those herb honeys so saturated with its funk and wildness that its sugar hardly registers, and bear in mind I’m tasting these at 53º and if you draw it from the fridge it will taste drier.
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Not that I’m apologizing for its RS! The overall impact of the wine is playful, angular, frisky, not entirely civilized, with a wild energy stopping just short of manic. But lest I forget, with the crystalline polish and keen etching of nuance that characterizes all of this domain’s wines.
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It actually “reads” sweeter than the Goldtröpfchen (and there’s a tiny echo of the celeriac note from the Kabinett) but there’s so much more pulse and torque, it emphasizes how sedate PiesGold can feel.
2022 Juffer Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese ++
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The classic smells just a classic should. The wine is so perfectly realized, so serenely, ideally itself, that you may be tempted to wonder about all this farting around with “GGs” and that fol-de-rol.
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I’m actually not tempted that way. At this point I have more use for a successful GG than for a Spätlese I should wait ten years to drink. We also cook differently than we used to, and most of our food doesn’t “want” sweet wine. So I am, definitely and positively, a “user” of dry Riesling nearly all of the time.
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And yet.
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What can you make of a wine as sublime as this, except to intuit some sense that a destiny is being enacted? It isn’t a zingy Spätlese, which is partly due to the vintage and partly due to the site. Juffer-Sonnenuhr shows a richness of flesh that is nonetheless poised perfectly over its graceful frame, offering the lovely inferential umami I see in Dönnhoff’s Brücke, with which it shares a sense of always having existed, before we were present to receive it.
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To the basics again, the overall balance of this beauty is such as to obviate the entire question of “sweetness” per se, at least as we taste it. How we then set about to use it is another matter. I oscillate between respecting the demands of utility and wishing to banish them, because any object as beautiful as this should not have to justify itself by how it may be “used.” Maybe in the next world….
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Tasting it again, it’s the first wine in the collection to address the divine, and it’s that ineffable beauty that elevates a wine and also the estate that gave it to us. The “sum of the parts” mean very little here. Wines like this can offer an abiding echo of longing, to return us to the fascination of the world.
2022 Goldtröpfchen Riesling Auslese +
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A radically savory fragrance! Kandy spice to the max.
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With all these PiesGold, the sweeter they’ve been, the more sense they made. They grew a tangible spine, they assembled their elements in a poise that eluded the dry versions, they felt livelier, brighter; they sparkled and gleamed and they made the dry wines seem prosaic and lumpen.
I doubt this is fundamental. Haags probably select certain parcels for certain wines and I would expect, if this is true, that they choose the steeper parcels for higher acidity and greater tautness from which to make their sweet wines. It certainly works here, and this type of wine helps us to “get” why the site is so popular. But saying that, I also think there’s only so far it can go (except for the few bottlings from some of the upstream terraces, that give wines radically unlike the general run of PiesGold), and even mindful of (what I think are) its limitations, hat’s off for a fine, fine Auslese.
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It also addresses a sort of template for “Auslese” that emphasizes the savory. You’d be correct to disregard Auslese that’s too confected, too glazed-donut, too much frosting and too little cake. There’s a sense in which this wine smells like polenta or mango; not that it isn’t “sweet,” but there’s all this savory stuff below it. It forms from an internal concentration connected to ripeness, desiccation and dehydration of the grapes, and sometimes botrytis, as here. It is a “low” flavor, an umami flavor, whereas sugar is a “high” flavor, a top-of-the-tongue flavor. If you think of maple and especially of those artisan syrups that taste deep and not terribly sweet, you’re in the zone.
2022 Niederberg Helden Riesling Auslese ++
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Whew, I do like this vineyard. Here is a “special” wine that hasn’t remotely lost the wildly herbal character of any of its predecessors, but has rendered them in a sort of exalted form, something that is basically savory, stupendously peppery, and that craves a spot at the table with your meal. Here’s an Auslese that isn’t remotely a sweet little bon-bon to sip contemplatively but is rather a sinewy, racy wine, even with its (slight) botrytis, that zips and zooms along its springing, leaping way.
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That said – and I don’t disavow it – we drank a glass after dinner and it was appropriate to do so. The wine, when “tasted” acted as described, but its fundamental sweetness really emerged on supper-saturated palates, where it was a welcome jolt of freshness. Auslese is Auslese, after all.
2022 Niederberg Helden Riesling Auslese -Goldkapsel- ++
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For good growers, the late-season botrytis of 2022 was about as perfect as could be. Here it is napped over the foregoing Auslese but not in a way that renders it discretely sweeter, more “dessert-like,” but instead retains the zippy, savory character and adds a note of salted caramel. I have learned to be wary of Auslese, too many of which are simply too gooey – but this is a work of genius, and in its way it clarifies what makes a “great” estate great.
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The flavors don’t matter. I mean of course they “matter” but I’ve already told you what they are in all the preceding wines from here.
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What matters is the rendering, and the image I have for that is one of the utmost fastidiousness – the painter daubing the perfect finishing touch on her work; the composer finding exactly the chord he sought; the potter working deep into the night, looking for the scrupulous proportions to bring the work to life; the chef tasting and tasting to get the dish to sing; the needleworker, the sculptor, the sushi chef; all of us, even the hapless wine writer, trying to access the divine, or at least to guide us to it. I’ve known poets who tormented themselves over a line-break (does the word belong here or in the next line?) and I have always believed artists who said “A work of art is never completed, only abandoned,” because after a while you can’t do anything more, and it is what it is.
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With a wine like this one, you may feel the work of art was indeed completed, because there is no way to imagine it better.