Rheinhessen 2018: Revelatory Rieslings
BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT |
For any oenophiles still unaware – or seeking proof – that Rheinhessen justifies a buzz of critical acclaim and consumer excitement currently unsurpassed worldwide by any Riesling growing region, a perusal of the wines turned out in 2018 should do the trick.
The famous Roter Hang of Nackenheim and Nierstein is enjoying a renaissance thanks especially to efforts at Gunderloch and Kühling Gillot, along with headline-grabbing wines from prime parcels that Keller acquired from the former Franz Karl Schmitt estate.
Surmounting Vintage Limitations
In characterizing the 2018 growing season, Klaus Peter Keller harkens back to an old saying of which his grandfather was fond: “Kleiner Rhein, Grosser Wein!” The Rhine indeed shrank to alarmingly low levels in 2018. But disrupted river traffic, like protracted heat and drought, is far more common now than it was when the aforementioned adage was coined; and if that saying were true, then we must lately be riding out a nearly relentless wave of great wine, including from once again drought-challenged 2019 and 2020. Indeed, it’s no doubt with folk wisdom and longstanding tradition in mind that so many observers – including even some wine journalists who ought to have known better – announced a “vintage of the century” in autumn 2018, something which by no means materialized. Instead, as my previous reports have made abundantly clear, not only is quality in 2018 far from uniform – due to local weather patterns but even more to how adequately vintage challenges were addressed – there are only a few German Riesling growers who will suggest that vintage 2018 is among their three or four most successful of the past two decades.
Ironically, the extent to which grapevines, unlike traffic on the Rhine, avoided coming to a standstill in summer of 2018 testifies to the paradox that, summer drought notwithstanding, this was actually a fairly well-watered recent vintage, especially in comparison with its two successors. Thanks largely to heavy late winter rainfall, an abundant supply of groundwater greeted the outset of vine activity. And paradoxically, too, this year of “kleiner Rhein” brought lots of wine; indeed, high yields are one of vintage 2018’s potential weak points. Keller claims that for most of Rheinhessen, the summer drought of 2018 was rivaled only by those of 1911, 1959, and 2001 – and few wine lovers need to be reminded that those vintages are legendary. But at the same time, Keller notes that at 10 inches (the same level recorded by Daniel Wagner in his “Rhinehessian Switzerland” sector), rainfall over the winter of 2017/2018 was the most abundant in many a year. The stage was set for what, thanks to a spring that was shockingly warm even by recent standards, would be turbocharged vine metabolism. And a perfect flowering, along with whatever internal mechanism it is that causes vines to compensate for a small crop one year with a large one the next, pointed toward abundance. A second consecutive year of hail in Keller’s neighborhood – specifically in the Morstein and Brünnenhäuschen vineyards that had been devastated in August 2017 – put only a small dent in the overall output of top Rheinhessen growers.
Readers of my previous reports on vintage 2018 – in particular the report covering the Nahe that kicked off this series – will already be familiar with some of the approaches taken that year to preserve acidity and moderate must weights. These included, in no particular order, early harvest, grape chilling, moderation of skin contact, and gentle (often fractional) pressing. But readers will also recognize that growers needed to adapt their entire viticultural regimen to the developing situation of this unprecedentedly precocious growing season, just as they have had to adapt and rethink their management of soil, canopy and crop in the face of climatic warming. There are arguably no German growers more receptive to rethinking and innovation than Rheinhessen’s regional leaders, and they have an outsized share of vintage 2018 successes to show for it.
If this looks to you like a young man willing to rethink his family’s already justly celebrated wine legacy, you’re right. Johannes Hasselbach is unafraid to explore new stylistic paths through his long-renowned Nackenheim and Nierstein vineyards.
Talent Without Timidity
For much of the past seven decades, Rheinhessen has had to live down a reputation for inexpensive bulk wine, much of which, prior to the 1990s, sold successfully as Liebfraumilch – both inside Germany and abroad – to a clientele that sought soft, slightly sweet but undistinguished wine. What suited Rheinhessen to this high-volume role during Germany’s post–World War II economic rise was above all the availability of fertile, mechanically harvestable flatlands that could be converted to viticulture, and access to grape crossings specifically designed to promote grape sugar even in growing seasons that would challenge or foil attempts to ripen Riesling. Those crossings, and the former-potato-fields-turned-vineyards, are still with us, but their acreage is shrinking. By the 1990s, it had become clear that if Rheinhessen was to have a flourishing viticultural future, it would have to be one associated with high-quality Riesling (and to a far lesser extent Pinot Noir). But nobody could then have imagined that such a future would emerge within a decade and result in Rheinhessen Rieslings selling for some of the highest prices of any German wines. Even more improbably, those Rieslings would emerge from parts of Rheinhessen that for at least the better part of two centuries had languished in relative obscurity.
