2022 Riesling Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spätlese #11

Joh. Jos. Prüm is an iconic address defining what the Mosel style stands for for many. The Prüm family has been in the region since the twelfth century. They are one of the estates that bought vineyard holdings after Napoleon’s secularization when this part of Germany temporarily became a French département. It was the family ancestor Jodocus Prüm who, in 1842, built the famous eponymous sundial in the Wehlener Sonnenuhr. The riverside villa in Wehlen looks across the river to this storied vineyard. The estate was founded in 1911 by Johan Josef Prüm. His grandson, Manfred Prüm, who ran the estate from 1969 onwards, is now 89 years old. His daughter Katharina Prüm took over in 2005 and now runs the estate with much élan and consistency – continuing its emphatically elegant style. No dry wines are made at Joh. Jos. Prüm and all fruit is estate-grown. Total holdings are 21 hectares, including a significant swathe of the Wehlener Sonnenuhr, Zeltinger Sonnenuhr, Graacher Himmelreich, Bernkasteler Badstube and Bernkasteler Lay. Viticulturist Marvin Bauer leads a crew of seven full-time employees, occasionally assisted by up to 40 seasonal workers for canopy management and harvest. He joined the estate in 2016, working alongside the longstanding viticulturist Karl Josef Heinz, who had overseen the vineyards for three decades before his retirement in 2021. No herbicides have been used since 2018. The 2022 harvest started on 19 September and concluded on 22 October in what their vintage report calls “one of the warmest and driest years on record, with unusually low amounts of rain between March and early September,” as Katharina Prüm writes in her annual report. The estate managed to harvest Kabinett, Spätlese and Auslese – the latter despite there not being much botrytis with an Auslese Goldkapsel from Bernkasteler Lay and Graacher Himmelreich and one Auslese Lange Goldkapsel from the Zeltinger Sonnenuhr. Two thousand and twenty-two is the second year in a row that no Auslese Goldkapsel could be made. While 2021 played into the hands of the elegant house style, the 2022 wines show the Prüms’ mastery of the genre because every wine is defined by elegance and notable restraint in residual sweetness. Two thousand and twenty-two is as poised as ever, already present and exquisitely aromatic.