The Saar’s Deliciously Diverse 2017s
BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT |
The outlines of 2017 on the Saar are already familiar from my earlier reports on Riesling Germany in this vintage. A turbocharged spring rendered precocious buds vulnerable to a hard, widespread April 20 frost that, in the worst instances, killed off 30–40% of them. After that, the weather was dry and warm – at times hot – until the end of July, at which point the Saar, unlike certain stretches of the Mosel, got just enough precipitation to stave off drought stress or reactivate vines that had shut down. Must weights rose rapidly in response, while phenolic and aromatic evolution lagged by comparison. Sporadic September rain led to unwanted botrytis in numerous locations. Vine and soil management, along with vine genetics, largely determined how much of a problem rot proved to be. A cumulative effect of the aforementioned factors – precocious start, low yields, warmth, water in the nick of time but then with some attendant botrytis – led most growers to launch their earliest-ever Riesling harvest (though vintage 2018 was to blow past those records). Fortunately, cool September and early October weather slowed the spread of botrytis, and the Saar benefited from its usual slightly lower temperatures and breezier, more open landscape than in the Mosel proper. In the more difficult instances along the Mosel, what got picked early in the face of encroaching rot could exhibit shrill acidity and borderline ripeness, while what got picked not that much later, though less acidic, was concentrated by not entirely noble rot. However, neither extreme was in evidence among the 13 Saar collections that I tasted.
Striking features of the 2017 Riesling vintage were high acidity and high – often freakishly high – levels of dry extract. The high acidity is surely a result of early harvest and cool September weather, in some instances compounded by vine shutdown during the height of summer heat. Among the Saar growers I visited, deacidification appears to have been rare and confined to musts destined for generic bottlings. At some addresses – including ones where this is not usually the case – dry wines were allowed to undergo malolactic transformation, and the drops in total acidity recorded in such instances testify to musts having harbored high levels of malic. As I have discussed in previous reports on this vintage, the high levels of dry extract – which, being in large part potassium, helps buffer out the vintage’s often high acidity – are not easy to explain. Most growers, having experienced serious crop loss due to frost, associate them with low yields. But those few sectors or vineyards that were left largely unscathed by frost – on the Saar, for instance, von Hövel’s in Oberemmel or Zilliken’s in Saarburg – rendered Rieslings with similarly extreme extract levels. And a dry, warm summer typically correlates with low extract: think of this as a case of less solid matter being deposited in grapes due to less water circulating through the vine.
Wiltingen's Braune Kupp and Gottesfuss (in the foreground) were, in 2017, once again sources for memorable Rieslings in dramatically different styles from Egon Müller's Le Gallais and Roman Niewodniczanski's Van Volxem.
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In 2017, the better Saar Rieslings benefited from their region’s generally cooler, breezier conditions vis-à-vis the Mosel proper, to achieve mouthwatering ripeness while avoiding unwelcome botrytis.
