Mittelrhein, Nahe, Pfalz, Rheinhessen, Rheingau

2014 Germany: Riesling Resists Rain on the Rhine

Two thousand fourteen will be remembered in Germany for an extremely stressful growing season and challenging harvest. But in Rhine regions that had luck with the weather, circumstances conspired to permit outstanding quality from growers whose viticultural regimens are scrupulous and who had skilled, motivated and outsized picking crews.

A Hot Spring and a Miserable Late Summer

In years when there is scarcely winter weather to speak of, wine growers become justifiably nervous contemplating pests that will eventually rear their ugly heads in greater than usual numbers, as well as vines that never really get the deep dormancy they crave. Two thousand fourteen was such a year. When spring then comes early and is unusually warm, growers at least sigh in relief at a head start that promises eventual ripeness. That also occurred in 2014, when budbreak in many of Germany’s Riesling vineyards, for the umpteenth time already this young century, set a new record. (For Wilhelm Weil in Kiedrich it was April 7.) 

As unseasonably warm, dry weather continued through May, there was inevitable worry that one or two frosty nights might destroy the vines’ tender shoots, thereby jeopardizing both quality and quantity. But no frost materialized. June was extremely dry and downright hot, with disruption of flowering in some sectors resulting in millerandage, thus assuring limited yields from loose clusters and in the process further moving up the date on which it could be anticipated that the crop would ripen. As has been the case repeatedly during the last two decades, even growers of Riesling harbored well-grounded fears that the harvest might have to begin disadvantageously early amid still-warm conditions.

July brought slightly cooler weather as well as timely rains to ward off shutdown or drought stress in the vines, and these conditions further accelerated the crop’s evolution. Then came a thoroughly miserable August. Almost everywhere on the Rhine and Mosel it was rainy and gloomy, the luckier regions being those where temperatures also dropped significantly, putting the brakes on vine metabolism as well as pest populations. “I’ve never seen an August so dark and damp,” remarked Martin Franzen of Müller-Catoir, “and yet, it was sometimes 21, 22, maybe 24 degrees [i.e., 70 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit], which was perfect for drosophila. And once a tiny hole gets bored into a berry, it becomes a microbiological time bomb.” Reports differed wildly among growers as to how much of the toll inflected on Riesling was from the invasive species Drosophila suzukii that literally bores into even unripe grapes but is known to prefer red ones (it devastated Pinot Noir vineyards in Baden and the Pfalz), and how much instead from “plain old native fruit flies,” not to mention yellow jackets. Either way, late August and September insect damage was widespread and enormous.

Wagner-Stempel’s Heerkretz Vineyard before and after pre-selection    

From Many, Few: Much of what hung on the vine in 2014 was incompatible with excellence. Some growers, such as Daniel Wagner, were able to manage a thorough “pre-harvest” of top sites before returning to collect what was left. And what was left at Wagner-Stempel formed the basis for an exciting collection by any standards.

Even though September brought significant breaks in the rain, growers found their grapes targeted by both acescence (the process of acetous fermentation) and rot, the spread of each accelerated by marauding insects. (Though, in a role reversal that no grower I spoke with could explain, Burgundy varieties—including Pinot Noir insofar as it managed to escape suzukii—often resisted rot even more successfully than did Riesling.) In some vineyards, it was beginning to smell and look frighteningly like 2006 or even 2000. But fortunately, only for brief periods did 2014 approach the outright tropical conditions that had turned those earlier rained-on harvests into veritable routs.

The relatively loose clusters were another godsend at this point. Depending on location and, above all, on how adeptly and assiduously growers pulled leaves, removed problematic bunches in advance, and in general managed their vines, many of them still had a decent-sized and largely healthy Riesling crop headed into October. (If you had chosen to apply any fertilizer in 2014, you had rotten luck.) But by then the margin between success and disaster could be thin indeed, especially when measured in days. Daniel Wagner put it this way, and had the photographic evidence to prove it: “one day a berry was beautiful; on day two you could just make out tiny tears or punctures in its skin; on the third day you had full-fledged, furry botrytis.” Simultaneously, as Martin Franzen testified: “In a matter of hours the grapes could go from green to acetic.” And as if all this were not bad enough, heavy rains hit most regions again in early October.

Obviously, circumstances like these made for an extremely stressful and challenging harvest. “Sometimes the clusters would look fine on one side; then when you turned them over it was a horror,” explained Geisenheim viticulture professor and Bacharach vintner Randolf Kauer, who concluded that “the assignment this year was to be highly selective of your material and then to not make any mistakes with that material. There could be no compromising: you were either going to have vinegar or good wine.” A concern articulated by many growers in recent years is that climate change, by shifting the harvest into the generally warmer early autumn and enhancing susceptibility to rot, will truncate the time available for picking. What Johannes Hasselbach of Gunderloch dubbed “the turbo vintage” of 2014 certainly forms a fat, dark data point along the line plotted by that hypothesis. Records were set throughout Riesling Germany for the shortest number of harvest days as well as for the most pickers ever employed.