2018 Riesling trocken

Johannes Haart began picking on September 18, 2018 to insure material for Kabinett, but like quite a few growers in his sector of the Mosel, he said that must weights did not advance to the rapid degree that he had feared. Not, that is, until the first week of October, when he reported that they took off again. Even so, harvest was not completed until the 20th of that month. Haart compared 2018 with 2011 for its combination of abundance, ripeness and relatively modest acidity, but noted that the 2018s are thankfully fresher in personality. Haart said he considered practicing fractional pressing, but in retrospect he didn’t think his wines suffered from his having decided against it. The dry wines reflect slightly less pre-fermentative skin contact than usual. They weigh in at between 12.5% and 13% in alcohol. Fermentations were sluggish, noted Haart, who strives for quite low residual sugar in his legally trocken bottlings. And neither the village-level wines nor any of the Grosse Gewächse was bottled before very late August 2019. Among other things, those extended stays in cask seem to have been responsible for a bit of alcohol getting blown off. Haart emphasized that his dry 2018s had not received any SO2 until bottling, “and immediately thereafter, they became quite reductive,” an observation that, like relative lateness of bottling, should be borne in mind when considering my restrained ratings. The 2018 Goldtröpfchen Grosses Gewächs was still in cask at the time of my visit and Haart was not ready to show. (Most of the sweet 2018s had been bottled in May 2019.)

In addition to the aforementioned absence of a review for the Goldtröpfchen Grosses Gewächs, further manifestations in my report of the considerable number of wines that Haart is now subjecting to late bottling and/or late release include a 2017 Piesporter Réserve and the 2016 Kreuzwingert. Haart bottled both Spätlese and Auslese from the Piesporter Domherr in the 2018 vintage, but regrettably and inexplicably, he did not show them to me, and by the time I learned of their existence, no opportunities were available to experience them. (For more on this estate – whose official name was formerly “Reinhold Haart” – consult the introductions to my coverage of their 2014s, 2015s and 2016s; and for some details on the sites they farm, consult selected tasting notes that accompany those reports.)