2016 Weissburgunder Einzigacker trocken

I finally visited with young Jochen Dreissigacker at his estate on the last day of August 2019. As regular readers of my reports will be aware, I had only met him once before and my experience with his wines was quite selective, seldom including his ostensibly top bottlings. I had found them very well made but reflective of the rather austere style that is nowadays praised among German Riesling growers as “puristic,” as well as of that other popular virtue in those quarters, Druck (literally “force”), the latter no doubt in part a function of Dreissigacker’s penchant for extensive pre-fermentative maceration. To quote my previous assessment: “I c[ould]n’t say that I have found much intrigue among the[se wines], and certainly no charm – which I suspect is beside their author’s point.” As it turned out, my visit was well-timed inasmuch as it found Dreissigacker completing a transitioning to giving his Rieslings significantly longer time before bottling and release, an approach made possible by the completion of a new production facility. As a result, it was only now possible to taste Dreissigacker’s top 2016s as well as some of the 2017s that were his first wines to benefit from 18 months’ or longer élevage. A transition is also underway here to greater reliance on traditional large casks, though that was not yet noticeable in my tasting, since recently purchased 2,400-liter Austrian Doppelstückfässer are being filled for their first three years with non-Riesling whites, which did not include the two non-Riesling wines from Dreissigacker (both Pinot Blanc) that I had a chance to assess.

It became obvious in conversation with Dreissigacker that he would have bridled at my associating his latest wines with current German fashion, but he readily critiqued his own past performances. Asked whether his penchant for radical dryness could sometimes encourage excessive alcohol, he cited his own 2011s as an example. “Back then,” he conceded, “the approach was more ‘cram everything you can into the wine: concentration, concentration, concentration.’ With 2013, we learned that an earlier harvest was beneficial. And although we’ve been organic the whole time, our vineyard regimen has also changed. For example, I have always advocated a relatively high canopy to provide some shade, but lately we’re being more sparing with hedging and more selective in leaf removal [around the fruit zone].” Longer élevage, along with other recent adjustments, seems likely to assist these wines in developing distinctive personalities and intrigue. Plus, tasting a wider range of Dreissigacker’s Rieslings, including from two of his three prestigious Westhofen vineyards (he didn’t offer my any samples from Aulerde), enabled me to form a far more balanced not to mention fairer and more enthusiastic assessment of his portfolio. To say that the best is yet to come from him would surely represent understatement.

While the top Bechtheim sites are warm even by Rheinhessen standards, they also tend toward deeper soils than those of Westhofen some two miles west, and this makes for water retention that was by no means a disadvantage in recent vintages with summer drought. On the other hand, problems associated with rain can be exacerbated, such as in 2016. Nevertheless, Dreissigacker characterized what he managed to harvest from that vintage as “my most beautiful grapes yet,” a claim quite consistent with my latest experiences. Between losses to requisite selectivity in vintage 2016 and to hail in 2017, Dreissigacker was one of many Rheinhessen growers happy to have finally harvested a “normal” crop in 2018. In a pattern by now familiar from across Riesling Germany, picking here in 2017 was very early by historical standards – lasting from the first days of September to the first days of October – while in 2018 the starting date moved up by a week, and harvest lasted until mid-October. “On the one hand,” opined Dreissigacker, “given the yields in 2018 we needed to get started, but in addition we realized that an early start would be critical to capturing freshness in the lower echelons of our portfolio, while the top wines benefited from later picking. We pressed more gently even than usual to preserve acidity, but even so, levels in the must hovered around one gram less per liter than in 2017.” And Dreissigacker persisted in giving most of his wines significant pre-fermentative skin contact.

I should briefly extend what I have already written about this estate by way of background (notably in the introduction that accompanies notes on a few of its 2014s). Over the last 15 years, Dreissigacker has doubled the aggregate size of his family’s property, now comprising 79 vine acres. Managing these, the cellar, and the business of Dreissigacker wines is a team unusually large for a family winery, and it now includes a joint cellarmaster, Achim Bicking, who with his brother also presides over a winery in the Zellertal. Only around 60% of the estate is planted with Riesling, while significant shares are devoted to all three variants of Pinot, and a smaller share to Chardonnay. (Until 2017, Dreissigacker had Silvaner in the Kirchspiel, but he ripped it out to plant more Riesling. Note that Geyersberg is Dreissacker’s top vineyard in Bechtheim and should not be confused with the eponymous site farmed in nearby Dittelsheim, whose name is often – though not by its best-known exponent, Stefan Winter – spelled with an “i” rather than a “y.”)