Mosel 2015: Rain in the Nick of Time

BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT | JUNE 22, 2017

Seldom has a vintage been better suited for tapping the awesome abundance of talent that has accumulated along the 135 circuitous miles of the Mosel between Trier and Koblenz, where sites and growers are testing one another’s potential with increasingly exciting results. 

As I detailed in the introduction to my initial report on this German Riesling vintage (covering the Saar and Ruwer), 2015 was characterized by high temperatures and low precipitation all the way from January until early September, with heat and drought reaching stressful proportions for most of the summer. Major rainfall then ushered in a period of cool, clear weather that extended in most sectors from the last days of September into early November, permitting growers for whom delay of harvest was a reasonable option to eventually strategize and optimize their picking. In Willi Schaefer’s words, “It was a picture-book autumn, with four weeks of perfect weather.”

Abuse of the village name “Piesport” and dearth of growers doing justice to its fabled slopes are now, happily, just bad memories. I have never tasted a larger number of profoundly delicious Piesport Rieslings, most of them from somewhere within the enormous site known as Goldtröpfchen, whose amphitheatric core rises immediately above “Old Piesport.”

The resultant wines have little in common with those from other vintages characterized by extreme drought and heat, but that apparent paradox resolves itself when one considers that the vines (in conspicuous contrast to 2003) were primed by a warm, dry spring to handle what ensued. The rains came just in time to re-activate any vines that had shut down or were malingering, and cool weather arrived ahead of the point at which grapes might otherwise have begun losing acidity. We have thus ended up with a vintage of ripe, largely botrytis-free wines that are high in acidity, as well as unexpectedly high in extract considering that the vines were short of water for most of the growing season.

The Mosel’s 2015 Advantage 

Degree of success in this universally fine German Riesling vintage depended, above all, on the ability of one’s vines to withstand the heat and drought of summer and then to take full advantage of the dry weather that followed the drenching September rainfall. Those cool, sunny, breezy weeks were ideally suited to building aromatic and phenolic finesse; to retaining acidity but swapping malic for tartaric; and to warding off rot. The Middle Mosel, with its high quotient of deeply rooted old vines as well as its inevitably delayed ripening when compared with the Rhine, was thus ideally equipped to capitalize on 2015’s potential. Still, technique, intuition and hard work in the vineyards were important as always.