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Materne & Schmitt

Janina Mathern and Rebecca Schmitt managed to reach 35 hectoliters per hectare in 2017 – their highest yields yet – thanks to April’s frost having been much less damaging in the steep terraces of their sectors than it was along other stretches of the Mosel. The major negative influences on yields this year, they reported, were ravaging wild boar (which gobbled up nearly the entirety of their fruit in the Lehmener Lay); relatively high skin-to-juice ratios; and the need to eliminate any fruit tainted by rot or the legacy of a late-summer powdery mildew outbreak. Picking occupied the last week of September and the first half of October.

The small Materne & Schmitt team now has a more adequate cellar facility than was at their disposal for their first three vintages, and beginning with vintage 2018, their portfolio will reflect the addition of a small parcel of old vines in the Winninger Röttgen. It should be noted once again that although all of the Materne & Schmitt 2017s are legally dry – and you will frequently and understandably see them promoted as “trocken” – the duo continue to omit that designation from their labels, and my convention in reporting for Vinous is not to include in a wine’s name information that does not appear on the label. Apropos of dryness, these 2017s are radically so; but, interestingly, while many lots of wine fermented quickly, i.e., before year’s end, several fermented into summer 2018. One from the Ausoniusstein that did not reach legal Trockenheit is tentatively destined for late bottling, late release, possible blending with the mere hundred liters of Lehmener Lay that were salvaged and designation as a “reserve.” On the sole occasion when I was able to taste the generic and village-level vintage 2017 bottlings, three out of four were shrouded to varying degrees by reductive and fermentative notes, which hopefully will have been shed in the course of 2019. (For more about this very young estate, consult my coverage of their 2015s. Rebecca Materne’s significant other, Tobias Feiden, is also involved with production here, and for an account of the promising Pinot Noir that he crafts in the same cellar, search under his name in this report.)

From Multifarious 2017 Mosels, Part 1: Winningen to Wehlen (Jan 2020) by David Schildknecht

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2017 Riesling Wunschkind

Release Price: $22

Color: White

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