2015 Riesling feinherb Molaris L

Peter Geiben’s 2015s represent his most consistently successful collection in many years, and numerous bottlings exhibit a purity of fruit and transparency to nuance that has of late too often been missing at this address. Despite some deacidification and malolactic conversion of the dry wines, the best of those also exhibit brightness and clarity. The sole genuinely disappointing wine was a rather soft, diffuse feinherb liter bottling that revealed where Geiben directed the less-than-pristine fruit that came along with this vintage. The present collection is pulled two ways: toward classic Ruwer Riesling virtues on the one hand and, at times less impressively, toward botrytis on the other. Geiben’s long-time companion and collaborator Sylvia Wels explained to me in his absence that vine stress, especially in young vineyards, was a serious issue for the estate in 2015, and water was carried by tank to keep certain parcels from completely succumbing. But there are no negative effects from stress or shutdown evident in the glass. Nearly all of the grapes were harvested in the second and third weeks of October. Here’s hoping that these 2015s signal a sustained return to the sort of quality that characterized this estate from the late 1980s through the 1990s.