2017 Riesling Graacher Himmelreich Auslese

The Prüm team commenced picking on September 25, 2017, and managed to finish in less than four weeks. Volume was trimmed by frost, which, as Katharina Prüm noted, eventually accelerated the accumulation of sugar, one result of which was that there are only two Kabinett bottlings from the vintage, and both in very small volume. The core of this year’s portfolio comprises its Spätlese and a veritable slew of enormously impressive Auslesen. Enough botrytis was deemed optimal to permit qualities all the way to TBA, though as usual, wines in the two topmost Prädikats will not be released for at least several and perhaps many years after bottling – and rarely, alas, am I permitted to taste any of those. Apropos of which, I have also not tasted the quartet of vintage 2017 Wehlener bottlings – Spätlese through “long gold capsule” Auslese – that were auctioned in September 2018. Acid levels are almost universally elevated this year, which frequently results in striking brightness and animation to complement the wines’ richness. Prüm emphasized her conviction that these days, what happens weather-wise in the run-up to harvest is generally decisive for how much and what sort of acidity is retained, with the cool spell that set in during September being the deciding factor in 2017. Those wines I tasted in mid-September 2018 had been bottled between mid-June and mid-July.

I realize that the Prüms consider it heresy to drink their wines young, and I recognize from long experience how much they benefit from time in bottle. Nevertheless, to award scores well into the 90s for wines that I found hard to leave behind in the glass and then to suggest that one shouldn’t enjoy them already (after all, I certainly did!) strikes me as incongruous, if not downright ludicrous. Generally, only in those instances – and there are nearly always some in any new Prüm collection – where yeasty and fermentative aromas significantly shrouded a wine do I indicate that one should wait a bit before popping even the first cork. And apropos of that reductive “Mosel stink” associated with this address, it is a phenomenon I have struggled over the years (recently with considerable input from Katharina Prüm and the gurus of Geisenheim) to understand, but I can definitely report that instances are nowadays not only capricious but also much rarer than they were a decade or more ago – aspects of this phenomenon that only compound its inscrutability. (For thoughts about this venerable estate’s recent evolution, consult especially the introduction to my coverage of their 2014s.)