2014 Riesling G Max

The 2014 growing season not only offered another opportunity for Klaus Peter Keller to demonstrate his mastery of difficult situations by means of well-honed strategic intuitions, it also played into his hand by promoting his preference for achieving ripeness at modest must weights. Another Keller predilection was much more difficult to satisfy in 2014: delay of harvest until the fruit can benefit from cool weather, which he perceives as essential to a fullest flowering of Riesling’s aromatic potential and palate finesse. “The way things were looking in spring and mid-summer of 2014,” he pointed out, “there didn’t appear to be much hope of a late harvest amid cool nights.”

Under the circumstances, then, Keller professed delight at the rainy, relatively cool late summer that followed, and although his grapes did not benefit from quite such late picking or nighttime chill as he considers ideal, his 2014 collection spectacularly reflects its author’s determination, by means of strategic canopy and yield management, to achieve ripe aromatics and flavors at modest must weights without sacrificing hang time, and finesse without sacrificing concentration. “True, the grapes never hung through real cold,” he conceded when cornered in a recent e-mail, “but I guess every rule has to have its occasional exception.” In Nierstein, where the season is always at least a week in advance of his home vineyards in Dalsheim and Westhofen, the refined results Keller achieved are particularly notable. Especially poor flowering in Nierstein, by lowering yields, further accelerated sugar accumulation; yet Keller was able to delay picking there until October 5 through 11, and the leisure with which he could accomplish this (seven days for just two small vineyards!) speaks volumes for exceptional sanitation despite significantly warmer temperatures and more October rain than were experienced by his signature sites in the Wonnegau.

To the litany of viticultural measures that could be cited as conducive to exceptional quality chez Keller should be added his use of a restored basket press that is now being utilized for a significant share of production across a wide stylistic spectrum. And to the extent that Keller’s most recent collections seem to have yielded wines of even greater clarity and precision than before, he suggests that the quality of juice falling from that press is at least partly responsible. Keller’s success in nobly sweet format--indeed, the very fact that he harvested so many such wines--is remarkable for 2014, though he hastens to point out that these were all picked in the first half of October with remarkable dry botrytis and extremely high levels of tartaric acidity, both of which would, he claims, have been lost later in that month. (Note that I have also included below my notes on Keller’s exceptionally successful though unfortunately also exceptionally small crop of 2013 Pinot Noirs.)

Having called attention in my introduction to this report to the recently conferred liberty to register and then utilize on labels the relevant cadaster names, I must report that the name “Abtserde” is not likely to be among those to be so-registered, or at least not by Keller. After years of fruitless wrangling with the authorities over this issue, he intends to stick with his current contrarian practice of mentioning the relevant Einzellage, namely Brunnenhäuschen, and then prominently displaying the combination of letters and symbols “Abts E®” (for a time it was “Abts E®.de.”). This having been noted, I am breaking with my usual conventions and taking the liberty of describing these wines using the site designation “Brunnenhäuschen – Abtserde.”

Incidentally, there is no Westhofener bottling this year; rather, the next qualitative step up after “Von der Fels” is the Grosse Gewächse. “I didn’t want to make things too complicated,” Keller explained. “If there is going to be a Westhofener village wine, naturally there could also be a Dalsheimer from the Hubacker, and I didn’t want to go down that route.”