Generous to a Fault, Mosel 2018: Winningen to Wehlen

BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT | AUGUST 13, 2020

The 2018 vintage in Riesling Germany was generous in both its precocious ripeness and its productivity, both of which took many growers by surprise. “Generous” also captures the extent to which most of the 2018 Mosels offer easy access with their dominant fruitiness, relatively modest acidities and often caressing textures. Preserving acidity, reining in must weights for dry wines and capturing aromatic finesse were among growers’ most urgent and by no means easy tasks, as detailed in the account that accompanied my first report in this series (which subsequently focused on the Nahe).

Joh. Jos. Prüm fielded a 2018 collection equal to this estate's iconic status, strong even at Kabinett level, thanks to an early start. “Accepted wisdom was always to wait so as to harvest with maximum ripeness," notes Manfred Prüm, but we learned our lesson with 2011 that it isn’t always best to wait."

Luck and Locality

The great luck of 2018 was a wet winter as well as considerable rain immediately following the precocious and complete early June flowering. Any further rain to relieve the hot, dry summer of 2018 was meager and varied greatly from one stretch of the Mosel to the next. For instance, late August found top sites around Traben-Trarbach – which had seen not a drop of rain for six weeks – suffering visibly from the extended drought and heat. And while outright vine shutdown would certainly tap the brakes on what were in most places record-high must weights for the time of year, acid levels were already approaching what many growers would consider the ideal point at which to pick. Yet around one large bend in the Mosel, at Erden, there had been enough August rain to turbocharge the entire ripening process. “Even in Kinheim, just three kilometers downstream from us,” noted Erden vintner Stefan Justen, “they got scarcely any rain.” But as Justen’s own collection would eventually demonstrate, the generosity of 2018 proved a mixed blessing.

The story of 2018 along the Middle Mosel is thus significantly local. And local variations, being in this case so meteorologically dependent, don’t always track with familiar expectations. The Lower Mosel’s steep, excessively drought-prone terraces are generally already drier in their prevailing weather patterns than the rest of the Greater Mosel, and especially in recent years, even Rieslings from the top producers can want have sometimes wanted for acidity. So one might have anticipated that this sector would be at considerable disadvantage in vintage 2018; yet the handful of “Terrassenmosel” proprietors whom I routinely visit rendered some very fine and adeptly balanced dry Rieslings. A period of vine shutdown probably helps account for the alcoholic moderation, while the high ratio of tartaric to less-efficacious malic acid doubtless contributed welcome animation. That ratio also explains why wines that underwent malolactic conversion (a common occurrence at leading Lower Mosel estates) shed very little total acidity in the process. What’s more, as explained further in the introduction to my initial report in this series on German Rieslings of 2018, lack of water translated into low extract levels, which cash out as low levels of potassium, so that what acidity the 2018s manage to muster (and that too varies enormously, even more by grower and individual vineyard than by sector) is not significantly buffered, thus manifesting itself as brighter, sharper and more animating than the sheer level of total acidity would lead one (or, indeed, led most growers) to anticipate. Baked or cooked aromas and flavors such as characterized 2003 and on occasion also 2011 are largely absent in 2018.