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Florian Weingart

Weingart suffered some of the worst 2014 crop losses to rot and rigorous selection of any grower I visited in 2015. In several parcels he claims to have salvaged a mere 10%. When coupled with his determination, acted on over the past several years, to gradually reduce the size of his estate to a level at which he can do most of the work himself, this spelled critical commercial shortage for an estate that is anyway often nearly sold out over the spring. (And despite their efforts to retain samples, I inevitably miss out on tasting some wines at this address.) That there is anything left at all for sale in September (last year there were only two wines) is often a function of another, long-standing Weingart determination: to look charitably on wines that don’t wish to ferment down to legal dryness, the condition that would best suit a thirsty domestic market, but instead find their own lovely balance with hidden or subtle sweetness.

Regardless of whether some residual sugar alleviates the alcohol in his wines, Florian Weingart has additionally been very proactive in bending back the curve of grape sugar accumulation though modification of pruning, canopy management and yields. Since his promising vineyards on old terraces formerly planted to fruit trees in his home village of Spay are ripening even faster than those immediately up-river in Boppard--the promising Pinot Noir has repeatedly surpassed 14% alcohol--he says that when his new winery along the next downstream bend in the Rhine is finally completed (there have been horribly partisan bureaucratic delays), he’ll seek allowance for an experimental planting on that property of some ostensibly warmer-climate black grape.

With Riesling in 2014, though, the imperative to pick before the entire crop was lost to rot meant that most musts came in at very modest levels of sugar--so modest in fact that Weingart in many instances lightly chaptalized, which explains a dominance of offerings that lack Prädikat. Only one wine was bottled as Spätlese (just like in 1987, the first vintage I tasted here), whereas in many recent vintages that category has dominated, and wines sold as “Q.b.A.” have in effect been de-classified Spätlesen. There was also some must de-acidification this year (shades of 1987 again). But don’t assume for any of the above reasons that the wines won’t merit following for a few years (those 1987s were lovely for a decade, and Florian’s dad readily admits to his son’s superior skill.)

From 2014 Germany: Riesling Resists Rain on the Rhine (May 2016) by David Schildknecht

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2014 Bopparder Hamm Ohlenberg Riesling trocken

Release Price: $25

Color: White

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