2015 Riesling Bopparder Hamm Engelstein Spätlese

“Two thousand fifteen is a relatively great vintage,” said Florian Weingart with a familiar combination of insight and irony. What he meant is that it was great not to have had to relive the quantitative privations or qualitative challenges of the two immediately preceding harvests. “It didn’t look great early on, though,” he added, due to drought stress and an anticipation of berries with little juice. In the event, Weingart was happy for the half hectare he had equipped with drip lines. But Boppard, he reported, got a little rain in August that other Riesling growing sectors didn’t, which helped ward off shutdown or outright desiccation. “We were also challenged,” he noted, “because the significant September rain brought botrytis in its wake, and it was an effort to keep must weights from getting prematurely elevated. On the other hand, my attempt to select a Beerenauslese failed because the quality of botrytis just wasn’t good enough for that.” Weingart also reported relief that, once botrytis had been adequately culled, his 2015s fermented without difficulty, albeit frequently finishing in that 10 to 30 gram residual sugar range that most German Riesling growers intentionally (though regrettably) avoid.

As usual, by the time I got around to visiting with Weingart, a couple of his legally dry wines were no longer available even for tasting. “I gave the trocken and halbtrocken wines additional pre-fermentation skin contact this year,” explained Weingart, “to help buffer the high acidity. But one can argue whether or not that was the right course,” he added with typical frankness.

In recent years Weingart has shed contract parcels, including those he had farmed in the Schloss Fürstenberg vineyards outside Bacharach. Notwithstanding his having downsized in search of optimal estate acreage and maximum personal control, he recently added acreage high above Bacharach’s Hahn (Einzellage: Matthias Weingarten)—parcels that, like those of the Josts in that same sector, were chosen to achieve wines of Kabinett levity. After close to a decade, Weingart has finally surmounted bureaucratic hurdles so high it’s hard for a non-EU citizen to imagine, not to mention obstacles placed in his way by too-familiar small town pettiness, and is building his dream winery under a vineyard hillside on the edge of Spay. Despite an impending very early harvest, he expects to crush his 2017s there. (For a bit more background on this estate, consult the introduction to my account of its 2014s. Information on the vineyards whose cadaster names Weingart registered in 2014 can be found in my notes on his wines from that vintage.)