Saar Riesling 2018: Beating the Heat 

BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT | JULY 02, 2020

The precocious 2018 vintage with its hot, dry summer, held the potential for wines short on acidity and high in alcohol. Fortunately, adept growers worked successfully to avoid that outcome, and estate owners nearly everywhere saw a combination of generous ripeness with unexpectedly abundant yields, as detailed in the account of this growing season with which I began my recent coverage of the Nahe. Still, one can imagine more than a few growers having wished they were on the Saar, whose hills and side valleys are known for being cooler and breezier, and for birthing Rieslings correspondingly more acid-retentive and buoyant. But wishing oneself on the Saar was probably rare until recently.

The Euchariusberg Einzellage incorporates several hillsides stretching from Obermennig to Krettnach. Its once-renowned Gross Schock sector, not visible here, hosts Hofgut Falkenstein's oldest and best parcels of vines, and now also reveals excellence from Stefan Müller.

Ripe for the 21st Century

Writing in 1897 at the height of the Mosel’s fame, Karl Heinrich Koch marveled that “the Saar contributes only one-tenth to the total production of [the] Mosel, [yet] its qualitative significance becomes immediately clear when one assesses its contribution to the great Trier wine auctions,” where close to half of the barrels sold from the great 1893 vintage were of Saar Riesling, and averaged 20% higher hammer prices than did those from the rest of the Mosel. Sixty years later, Frank Schoonmaker, in his classic German Wines, was no less awed by what he termed “the great and exceedingly rare wines of the Saar,” but emphasized “rare.” “Once, twice, or at most three times in a decade,” he opined, “nature is kind,” a claim echoed for subsequent generations of oenophiles by Hugh Johnson, who wrote in his World Atlas of Wine: “The battle for sugar in the grapes rages fiercest in this cold corner of [Germany]. It is won perhaps three or four years in ten.”

Before 1988, it was considered normal when Riesling grapes failed to properly ripen even in privileged sites; only years in which hail or frost wiped out the crop or in which the grapes had scarcely even softened come November were deemed genuinely calamitous. The rare great Saar vintage was typically one featuring an exceptionally hot, dry summer - 1959, 1976, and 1983 being classic examples - or fine weather combined with low yields, as in 1953, 1969 and 1971. On rare occasions, as in 1975, both growing season and yield proved felicitous. And ripeness in top years conduced to wines with tasteable residual sugar.

That was then.

The excellence of the best Saar Riesling is today no less awesome. But this region’s top sites now render such excellence annually. And it is no more difficult to achieve harmonious, complex dry Rieslings than it is sweet ones. Moreover - something Frank Schoonmaker would have found just as unthinkable as would Karl Heinrich Koch - there are now vintages like 2018 in which Saar growers would be happy with a bit less warmth, sunshine and grape sugar. Few growing regions can have gained more from what we now recognize as gradual climatic warming that began steadily accelerating during the last decades of the 20th century. For the time being, at least, Saar vintners will happily live with excessive heat and high must weights being the occasional annoyance. And even that problem, as vintage 2018 shows, can be surmounted to a surprising degree.