2015 Riesling Wallufer Walkenberg Auslese trocken

Hans-Josef Becker is unquestionably one of the most remarkable, not to mention indefatigable, wine growers in Germany, let alone in his native Rheingau. That his wines have seldom reached our shores is ironic given that most of the bottles of great 1960s and 1970s German Riesling that inspired American wine lovers of my generation were chosen and imported by Frank Schoonmaker and successor Château & Estates, for whom Becker and his father Josef before him served as commissioner and logistics point man. But at that time and subsequently, Becker’s infrequent presence in US shops or restaurants ultimately came down to his choice of eschewing personal promotion and building a dedicated following among his countrymen for Rieslings and Pinots that spoke for themselves, in a language all their own. That vinous idiolect was strikingly singular back when Becker, after a 1963-64 stint at the late, great Schloss Eltz and studies at Geisenheim from 1966 to 1968, returned to take over his family’s estate. As he tells it, he was blown away by the quality and distinctiveness of what he encountered in cask at Eltz, because at the time all of the Rheingau Rieslings with which he was familiar featured a good 20 or more grams of residual sugar. That was true of bottled wines from Eltz, too, where the cellarmaster explained to young Becker that Riesling in cask represented unfinished raw material. So when Becker took charge at home, he began offering Rieslings he allowed to ferment unassisted, then bottled “as is.” He promptly lost the family’s customers, but found a new clientele that discovered it shared his predilections, which would have been hard back then to satisfy at any other address.

Sticking to his guns methodologically and stylistically kept Hans-Josef Becker radical, even after the Rheingau eventually converted en masse to Riesling trocken. Becker persisted in the traditional practice of only bottling his young Rieslings immediately ahead of the next harvest, and in many instances he gave them even longer in cask. Fermentations here take place largely in pressure tanks, after which the young wines are racked into traditional Rheingau Stückfässer, where they remain on their fine lees until bottling. Viticulturally, too, Becker resisted both the trends that prevailed in his youth and subsequent fashions. That meant preserving old vines and, when replanting was unavoidable, spurning clones in deference to massal selections. It meant farming organically, though he never advertised it, at a time when the practice was almost unheard of among German winegrowers. Vines were trained low to the ground all through the international heyday of so-called Hochkultur, and canopy growth was encouraged even in an era of knee-jerk hedging. Such measures help keep must weights in check despite low yields and late harvest, though when I asked Becker recently to summarize how that trifecta is accomplished, I received this characteristic reply: “You just have to want to do it.”

The only other German Rieslings significantly resembling Becker’s are Koehler-Ruprecht’s. Both estates retain Prädikat designations for dry wines. Both have outstanding track records, which consumers can readily verify in Becker’s case by taking advantage of another tradition he perpetuates with a vengeance: holding extensive cellar stocks and simultaneously selling wines from multiple vintages. Easily a couple dozen years are represented on any given price list, and the US importer who has recently persuaded Becker to collaborate is tapping that depth. For this report, though, I am focusing only on a portion of Becker’s vintage 2015 collection, consisting of Rieslings that he and his Geisenheim-trained partner and wife Eva were about to bottle when I visited them in September 2016 (two of which I re-tasted stateside). I’d been away from this estate for a long time, but given what I’ve written here, you won’t be surprised to learn that in significant ways, time seemed to have stood still in the interim. It was after 10 o’clock at night when we finished up together, at which point the septuagenarian Becker literally put on his boots and began hosing down his facility in preparation for bottling. He had a lot to do, unassisted, before dawn. When I next report on this estate, I hope to offer tasting notes on a wider range of wines, including some nobly sweet 2015s that were very slow in fermenting, and Becker’s Pinot Noirs, which are as distinctively delicious and stylistically out of step as his Rieslings. Harvest here in 2015 did not get going until the end of the first week of October, but was completed by month’s end, with yields close to long-term average. Becker has always frowned on deacidification, but he suggested that “if it weren’t for their high levels of dry extract, the acidity of my 2015s would have come off as excessive.”