2014 Riesling Varidor trocken

Karl Josef Loewen is probably the Mosel's most inspiring and ambitious example of what his younger colleagues from farther downstream have taken to calling "mountain rescue" – namely, the revival of once justly renowned but long-neglected steep-slope Mosel vineyards. His top home site, the Laurentiuslay, is already staging a comeback thanks in part to the efforts of the Weis family (of St. Urbans-Hof) and Gerhard Grans. Loewen alone has been showcasing the excellence of Thörnicher Ritsch and Detzemer Maximiner-Klosterlay, and in 2008 he took over the Longuicher Herrenberg and ancient Maximiner Herrenberg vines of his now-retired friend Bruno Schmitt (Weingut Schmitt-Wagner). Like many in this part of Riesling Germany, Loewen is a direct descendant of the citizen who acquired the family's estate during the Napoleonic secularization of Church holdings. Many of the sites Loewen farms boast not only ancient, unreconstructed terraces but also ancient, ungrafted, single-post-trained vines. Loewen has also been a pioneer in lobbying for what is officially experimental repropagation of old vine selections. He was recently joined full-time by his Geisenheim-trained son Christopher.

Loewen has a keenly experimental nature and is tirelessly fine-tuning his viticultural regimen and style of wine. He has always professed a love of Mosel Riesling levity, but two trends, taken together, have made for relatively few recent wines exemplifying that virtue: first, a tendency to eschew botryticides, whose use he thinks usually backfires, and second, an increasing tendency for dry wines to dominate Loewen's portfolio. So I was very curious to see how he would react to vintage 2014, in which botrytis was seldom the Mosel wine grower's friend, but in which relatively low must weights made possible some delightfully low-alcohol Rieslings. In the event, Loewen did some preharvest culling and elected to wait out some of the worst rain, bringing in most of his fruit during an especially intensive nine-day stretch in mid-October, but some not until early November. Results were mixed in terms of both style and success. "We would cull the compromised fruit late in the day, then go back early the next morning to harvest the good bunches," he reported. Ever a defender of botrytis, Loewen insists that "it wasn't really bad in 2014; it's all the nasty stuff that grew along with the botrytis that caused problems." He observed that although his wines don’t undergo malolactic transformation, there was an unusually large dropout of tartrates and a consequent fall in acidity this year going from must to bottle, so he was pleased that the wines largely displayed ample vivacity and refreshment.