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Wittmann

Philipp Wittmann and I have for many years been trading frank and sometimes opposing stylistic observations, his being rather poetically summed up during my most recent visit when he remarked: “I prefer to forgo primary, engaging fruitiness and tread a stonier path in the direction of ever more puristic wine that needs time in the bottle to show its mettle. That can mean something almost a tick rustic in its first year because the charm of fruitiness is absent.” He went on: “First off, I’m not afraid of must oxidation—on the contrary. And maturing one’s wines in cask, which is my practice as you know, further inhibits primary fruitiness. Then there is the effect of long lees contact: nowadays I don’t rack and bottle my Grosses Gewächs until the end of the summer. All of this suppresses fruit.” Readers will not be surprised to learn that I argue that ageworthiness, minerality and precision in Riesling need not preclude flattering youthful fruit and charm, but flattery is clearly something Wittmann is out to avoid even in his intro-level Riesling, lest it be perceived as facile or pandering to commercial fashion. Ironically, the enormous qualitative pains being taken by Wittmann and many other German growers in the interest of self-described “puristic” motives result in their youthfully strict Rieslings being generated from tiny, blemish-free golden berries that most of us, at least superficially, would think of as epitomizing purity of fruit, but which they employ as vehicles for bypassing fruit flavors, the better, allegedly, to express terroir.

“Even though the grapes were still largely healthy, the ripeness was ample and we didn’t dare wait any longer to pick them,” said Wittmann of his whirlwind 2014 harvest with a crew of nearly 40, his largest yet. “I had been starting to regret that I had accepted so many young interns this year, but I ended up very happy to have them as pickers!” His office staff was pressed into service in the last days of September to pick Wittmann’s newly acquired parcels in Nierstein because urgent pre-harvest work was already underway by then in Westhofen. Wittmann put his wife, Mosel vintner Eva Clüsserath, in charge of that Nierstein crew, “because,” he joked, “I figured it would be steep enough there for her to feel at home.” Pre-fermentative skin contact was limited to four to eight hours in the press, usually after a light squeezing but without the fruit having first been crushed. Given the already pronounced phenolics of this 2014 collection, that gentle approach to extraction strikes me as having been a good thing; and as Wittmann pointed out, he did not have unusually high acidity that he had to worry about buffering. Like many of his colleagues, Wittmann was encouraged by the relatively modest must weights (i.e., potential alcohol) of his 2014 material to let the wines ferment as far as they could, all the way down to just two or three grams of residual sugar, which he not surprisingly also perceives as conducive to his ideal of “puristic” Riesling.

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

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2014 Silvaner trocken

Release Price: $22

Color: White

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