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Willi Schaefer

After recent experiences, Christoph Schaefer emphasized the sheer relief that he and his family felt at a vintage not savaged by hail or frost, as well as the luck of Graach’s top sites having relatively moisture-retentive soils and sufficient small springs to mitigate the heat and drought of summer 2018. “You could see this even from a distance,” he noted, “because our vineyards stayed green all the way through. There wasn’t a bit of vine stress. Whereas sometimes there come phases when there’s a bit of braking action. After the hot, dry summer of 2003, for instance, when you tasted the grapes in mid-September they were sweet, not yet really ripe. This year, they began tasting ripe even before mid-month.” As a result, the Schaefers began harvesting on September 16th. They ended up picking for four weeks, but Schaefer noted that most of the crop was brought in during the first two weeks, as he did not want to take the chance that already modest levels of acidity would begin dropping significantly. “We’d already reached a peak as far as ripeness and optimum potential, the point where you say, ‘It won’t get better’,” noted Christoph Schaefer, “and we didn’t want to risk losing the style of wine that we cherish.” But this “peak” turned out to harbor potential for perhaps the widest range of wines from a single vintage, stylistically speaking, in this estate’s history.

“There was very little botrytis,” related Schaefer, “and our focus was on Kabinett and Spätlese. Beyond that, there was very little.” “Very little,” though, needs to be taken against the background of a generous and exceedingly ripe overall crop. Between those ennobled bunches and berries that the Schaefers managed to collect and the advanced ripeness of some healthy but lightly desiccated fruit, they managed to render an array of Auslesen, a Beerenauslese, and even 50 liters of wine expected to become this estate’s first TBA. “The wonderful thing about the harvest,” reported Schaefer, “was that the weather and grapes turned out to be stable, so that you could take your time to make selections [auszulesen] without worrying about some other responsibility [to harvest a given parcel] being neglected.” Of the likely TBA, he insisted that “it wasn’t originally planned that way, really, but what there was of desiccated and botrytis-affected material was just so high in must weight and highly concentrated, yet also so glass-clear and fine.” (Willi Schaefer harbored career-long reservations on that score, believing that the measure of healthy, juicy grapes incumbent on a nobly sweet wine that would optimize Mosel virtues dictated stopping short of the selectivity required for TBA.) The Schaefers were not ready to show either of their two most concentrated, botrytis-affected wines at the time of my last tasting visit. Regrettably, they also omitted a Wehlener Sonnenuhr Ausele from my lineup.

From 2013 through 2017, the Schaefers passed on vinifying a Grosses Gewächs, giving various cogent, vintage-specific reasons for so doing. (From 2017, they didn’t even bottle a single legally trocken wine.) But there were no such reasons in 2018. “It was sensible to make a bit more dry wine this year,” averred Schaefer, “not just because of overall abundance but also given the structure of the raw materials.” And although the Schaefers would be the first to acknowledge that executing dry wines is not among their special talents, I was quite taken with the ostensibly lesser (i.e., non–Grosses Gewächs) of their two 2018 efforts. Incidentally, the Schaefer 2018s were as usual bottled in April, the sole exception being the Grosses Gewächs, which was not bottled until June of 2019. (For considerable detail about this estate and its evolution, consult the introduction to my accounts of their 2014s and 2015s.)

From Generosity and Diversity - Mosel 2018: Graach to Grünhaus (Nov 2020) by David Schildknecht

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2018 Riesling Graacher Himmelreich Grosses Gewächs

Release Price: $58

Color: White

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