2018 Riesling Bopparder Hamm Ohlenberg Spätlese feinherb

Florian Weingart compared 2018 in his sector with 2003. “With the enormous rainfall we had in early June,” he reported, “we figured there would not be any drought problem this year. But then there was no more rain the whole summer, and the sun kept beating down.” His harvest timetable was not an uncommon one for 2018. “We began picking at the beginning of September for fear of low acidity and of the rain that we thought would surely eventually come, but the weather stayed nice, so we took a break, and we ended up extending harvest through to the end of October. The grapes we left hanging stayed totally botrytis-free through November and could still be harvested in good shape as Eiswein on January 21, 2019, despite December having been wet and unusually warm. Given how impeccably healthy the grapes were, I started out imagining I would be able to make a lot of dry wines from 2018,” explained Weingart, who (as I have pointed out on past occasions) has often been commercially handicapped in recent years by a paucity of legally trocken bottlings, and who is philosophically and aesthetically disinclined to adopt more than the gentlest of measures for encouraging a young wine to ferment further than it “wants to.” “But in the event, there was a lot of phenolic bitterness in the musts, and there wasn’t much buffering due to the low dry extract. What’s more, I ended up with higher potential alcohol levels than I had hoped for. So I was happy to have mostly wines with noticeable residual sugar. And the sweetness integrated nicely once the wines had been on their fine lees until April.” Weingart thinks that, as he has observed with his 2003s, most though not all of his 2018s will be best enjoyed within a decade.

I tasted with Weingart in mid-September 2019 a majority of his 2018 collection, but still far from all of the wines, which tend to be rendered in relatively small lots, many of which sell out quickly. Intriguingly, among wines that I was unable to taste was the first-ever from this estate (a Kabinett trocken) to be labeled for the Bacharacher Mathias Weingarten, which is the source nowadays of nearly all of Weingart’s generic bottlings. (For extensive background on this estate and its recent evolution, including its downsizing, consult the introductions to my account of its vintages 2014–2017. Information on the vineyards whose cadaster names Weingart registered in 2014 can be found in my notes on his wines from that vintage.)