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Eva Fricke

Eva Fricke grew up in northerly Bremen, but a serious case of the wine bug led her to the Rhine and a degree from Geisenheim. She crushed her own first five harvests while still working full-time as Johannes Leitz’s operations manager, but from the beginning an estate of her own was Fricke’s goal. "I started out with a Rüdesheimer Berg idea," she said, but it wasn’t just the cost of land there that led her to look downstream and around the Rhine’s great northerly curve, toward Lorch and Lorchhausen. "I saw these soils, these old vines, and these exposures and I thought, ‘That's just got to turn out well.’ “ Gradually accumulating numerous small parcels on these steep and largely neglected slate slopes, Fricke expanded into Kiedrich when in 2011 she rented a cellar in that village and left Weingut Leitz. Just three weeks ahead of the 2015 harvest, she moved a short distance into a spanking new facility of her own on the outskirts of Eltville, but fruit from anywhere other than Lorch or Lorchhausen plays only a supporting role in her portfolio, and those two wine villages are where she continues to see the destiny of her estate, now comprising nearly 10 hectares (two of which aren’t yet planted). “When I was getting started,” she related, “grower colleagues were saying to me, ‘Eva, what on earth are you doing getting into Lorch? Things are totally different there from the rest of the Rheingau and the wines there have this odd tone’ – which was really a function of how many of the old Lorch vintners made them. Today,” she concluded with pride, “those very same colleagues are trying to buy land there!”

Fricke favors leisurely, spontaneous fermentations and is not much concerned whether a given wine reaches legal Trockenheit, though a majority of them characteristically do. She eschews the designations halbtrocken or feinherb. And some annoying experiences with the authorities as well as a look over her shoulder at the approach taken at VDP estates led her early on to eliminate Prädikat designations except for unabashedly sweet wines from extremely ripe grapes. The wines are generally racked off of their gross lees but remain on their fine lees until bottling and are given the lightest filtration Fricke deems feasible.

“I looked around and saw growers far and wide headed out to harvest, and my crew was ready,” said Fricke of September 2015. “But we didn’t have water or electricity yet” in her new facility. “And when we got around to picking the first grapes, I called an immediate halt. As soon as we’d begun pressing, the juice smelled odd and tasted completely unripe. Eventually we busied ourselves with other grape varieties, but we didn’t really get started seriously picking Riesling until the 8th or 9th of October, and then only for our basic Rheingau Riesling,” which comes largely from vines in Eltville and Kiedrich. According to Fricke, the ratio of malic to tartaric acid was still very high all through September, and she attributes the overall retention of acidity in 2015 primarily to vine shutdown during the summer. “Two thousand fifteen was our first completely organic year,” she noted, explaining that “since so many of the vineyards I took over had been conventionally farmed for a long time, I didn’t rush to get organic certification.” She adds that the effects of conversion to organic have been most notable in fruit from her Kiedrich vineyards, and less so in that from the largely old vines in Lorch and Lorchhausen’s rocky sites. “We got a higher conversion of sugar to alcohol in 2015 than in 2014,” she reported, “but high acidity, high extract, and a bit more residual sugar compensate for that.”

From 2015 Rheingau and Mittelrhein Riesling (Sep 2017) by David Schildknecht

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