2017 Riesling Deidesheimer Mäushöhle trocken

A young Anna-Barbara Acham greeted me in the first days of my inaugural wine tour of Germany in spring 1984. But although I was impressed with her seriousness and with her family’s wines (which, back then, she had to explain to me were “konsequent trocken”), I have only revisited this Forst estate a few times since. I was hearing very positive things about recent developments, including significant expansion in what was already a well-endowed lineup of Mittelhaardt sites – the estate now farms two dozen acres – so I paid a late August 2018 visit. There was only time to taste a cross-section of wines from recent vintages, and not only has the wine list here lengthened considerably from my last recollection, but Acham would have in any case preferred not to show all of her 2017s at such an early date. Thanks to her long-standing local connections, Acham has been able to acquire some extremely coveted acreage, and now fields wines from all but one of Forst’s top sites (the diminutive Freundstück). It’s almost literally an embarrassment of riches, since the VDP dictates that only a single dry wine (namely, the relevant Grosses Gewächs) can be labeled with the name of a “Grosse Lage.” “I have so much vine surface in Ungeheuer and Pechstein,” explained Acham, “that if I wished, I could bottle, respectively, 3,000 and 2,000 bottles of each. But one needs to be careful not to flood the market with Grosse Gewächse,” so the most she produces in that latter category is around a thousand bottles of Ungeheuer, while a second tier of wines from “Grosse Lagen” is sold under fantasy names. (Acham also owns a portion of Ruppertsberger Reiterpfad that has recently been replanted and will likely form the basis for an eventual fifth Grosses Gewächs bottling.) Acham-Magin now also boasts no fewer than seven Erste Lage vineyards (as defined by the VDP, of whose Pfalz branch this estate was a founding member). Most of the latter are bottled in spring (including, at least from vintage 2017, two, which I didn’t taste, that are not legally trocken), and the Grosse Gewächse are bottled in July. But despite that relatively early bottling, only the Grosse Gewächse of vintages 2015 and 2016 are currently on the estate’s price list, concurrent with the Erste Lage bottlings from vintage 2017.

The team here – including co-proprietor and estate manager Vincent Troesch, along with cellarmaster Rudi Becker – are clearly on a roll, and it will no longer do to for me to ignore this estate in my reports. There is a modest amount of export nowadays, mostly to other European countries, but unfortunately none to the US.