2017 Riesling Lorcher Schlossberg

With vintage 2017, Eva Fricke completed conversion to an organic regimen for all of her holdings, extending to those in several mid-Rheingau villages that have in recent years extended her vine surface to a total of 27 acres. Her farming in Lorch has been organic since 2011 and in her Kiedrich holdings since 2014. “Every year, I notice the Kiedrich wines becoming more expressive [ausdrucksstark],” claims Fricke, “and I especially noticed the improvements in this third year of organic farming [2017], without our having changed anything significant about our vinificatory regimen.” Kiedrich continues to dominate Fricke’s production from mid- (or, as she prefers to call them, “upper-“) Rheingau communes, while her site-specific bottlings remain focused on showcasing Lorch and Lorchausen terroirs, as has been the case since she began her operation in 2006.

April, 2017 frost served for a reduced crop in virtually all of Fricke’s vineyards. Hail at the beginning of August did significant damage to most of her mid-Rheingau parcels, setting them up to require harvesting with a scrupulousness that was compounded by the effects of late summer rain. (Fortunately, no hail fell on Lorch or Lorchhausen.) Fricke was dismayed to discover just how the insurance that she has against hail was designed to work. “Inspectors,” she explains, “go through the vineyard and count the number of berries in selected bunches. So they’ll say: ‘this cluster has a hundred berries and eight are kaputt, so that’s 8% damage.’ But coverage only kicks-in at 8%. In the end, I didn’t get any money at all.” In many instances, affected clusters succumbed to fungal infections after the rain and had to be cut to the ground. “And even where only a small number of berries had been hailed-on and the cluster remained healthy,” reports Fricke, “it risked excessive bitterness at pressing; and bitterness from drought-stress was already a danger in 2017. I am not one for fining my musts,” she adds, “so I ended-up pressing any problematic material at a really low pressure,” which naturally compounded what were already destined to be lamentably low 2017 yields. In the end, her crop overall was 40% short of this young estate’s average. In a number of vintages from Fricke’s early years, I experienced relatively aggressive phenolics and low-level botrytis as somewhat problematic. That her 2017s – conspicuously including her village-designated Kiedricher – have largely evinced textural polish and clarity is a tribute to the selective harvest, gentle handling and watchful vinification that now characterize Fricke’s regimen (which, incidentally, still involves no casks). Bottling here remains relatively early, commending in late March or early April and finishing by the end of May; and, as I have written before, it would be nice if she could afford to extend élevage, at least on an experimental basis.

Regrettably, I missed out on tasting Fricke’s latest bottlings of Pinot Blanc and Silvaner, as she had not inserted them into our November, 2018 line-up and I stupidly neglected to ask after their whereabouts. (For detailed background on this estate, consult the extensive introduction to my report focused on its vintage 2015 wines.)