2015 Riesling Winkeler Jesuitengarten Spätlese

“Those whose grapes were already ripe when the September rains hit were in trouble,” insisted Andreas Spreitzer, referring to a dividing line that fell within the confines of the Rheingau. Unsurprisingly, he added that “our grapes were still hard-skinned and healthy when the rain let up in mid-September. We only did our first picking on October 1,” he continued, “and we harvested for four weeks.” Ironically, though, the single most exciting Spreitzer 2015 came from a site that generally epitomizes the risks of prematurely elevated must weights and botrytis. (See my account of both their Winkeler Jesuitengarten bottlings.) This year’s Grosse Gewächse all got harvested from entirely healthy grapes at right around 99 Oechsle, translating into finished alcohol of 13 percent, and were bottled in early August. Of all the features his 2015s share, Andreas Spreitzer is happiest pointing to their high but ripe acidity. “Thank goodness we had such acidity again for a change,” he exclaimed, “to ideally balance the residually sweet wines.” Spreitzer judges the desiccated, spore-free botrytis that arrived here near the end of harvest as “perfect” and says it struck him as being the way the nobly rotten grapes of the great 1971 vintage were said to have looked. But I have not found nobly sweet Riesling to be the Spreitzers’ forte and my initial experience with their 2015s does not alter that impression. Speaking of noble sweetness, in the end there were 40 half-bottles of a Spreitzer 2014 Lenchen TBA, but I was not able to taste it.

Fermentations here are consistently (sometimes conspicuously) spontaneous, yet the Spreitzer brothers don’t seem to have trouble steering them in whatever direction is desired. “I want wines labeled trocken to taste well and truly dry,” said Andreas Spreitzer. “Our days of trying to leave behind eight or nine grams of residual sugar are over. But on the other hand, I’m not taking things in a masochistic direction, and I think just one, two or three grams of residual sugar is usually too little and unharmonious, which makes no sense.” Long defenders of “Kabinett” as a sign of alcoholic levity, even in legally dry wine, the Spreitzers have acquiesced to the VDP’s insistence that “Kabinett trocken” be treated as oxymoronic, and have accordingly bestowed new names to those bottlings formerly so labeled. At the same time, they have dropped single-vineyard designations from those wines in conformity with the VDP’s insistence that there be a “village tier” of wines in each member grower’s portfolio ... unless that grower doesn’t bottle legally dry wines, in which case, characteristically, it appears that the VDP couldn’t care less. (For further information on this estate and its vineyard holdings, consult the introduction to my account of its 2014 collection.)