2014 Münsterer Pittersberg Riesling Grosses Gewächs

Father and son Stefan and Georg Rumpf have been on a real roll lately, but even against that backdrop, their 2014 collection is jaw-dropping, perhaps in part, but only in part, because the inherent potential of this vintage especially suits their penchant for capturing generous fruitiness while promoting clarity and fine details. The Rumpfs recently acquired a 20-year lease on the Binger Scharlachberg holdings of Villa Sachsen, which were being farmed and vinified by Prinz Salm, thus giving them the dominant share of that once-famous Rheinhessen vineyard just across the Nahe. The Rumpf Scharlachberg bottlings have until now never numbered among their most successful, but the 2014s are collectively impressive, incorporating the fruit of terraced 30-year-old vines that enjoy a breezier, cooler microclimate. Also new and welcome here are prime plots in the Laubenheimer Karthäuser (beginning 2015) and the gradual assumption of vineyards from the nearby P. A. Ohler winery, a name familiar to a few veteran German wine enthusiasts stateside from the 1980s and 1990s, when proprietor Bernhard Becker was in Terry Theise’s portfolio. Both of these acquisitions include Scheurebe as well as Riesling vines, the latter including an old, very low-yielding Scheurebe parcel in the Dautenpflänzer.

Georg Rumpf suggested that the increasing willingness of Germany’s most serious Riesling growers to take risks for the sake of quality is on a collision course with nature’s seemingly ever-narrower windows of opportunity for harvest. There was certainly no collision here, though, thanks in part to an enlarged crew, a third press, and well-honed intuitions. What veteran Stefan Rumpf called “the most nerve-wracking harvest of my career” began in the last days of September and the Grosse Gewächse were all harvested around October 10. “Sure, we could have waited longer to pick the Grosse Gewächse, but to sacrifice crop for just one or two more degrees Oechsle did not make sense to me,” said Georg Rumpf. And he is among the many German Riesling growers wisely concerned more about ending up with too much grape sugar than too little. In 2014, though, he happily let his Grosse Gewächse ferment to lower-than-usual residual sugar since there was no risk of excessive alcohol. “Skin contact was difficult this year,” he said. “Of course, you can employ dry ice, but it was awfully warm at harvest. And once we started tasting the musts, we determined that the best thing was to press and process the grapes as rapidly as possible so as to avoid problems with volatility or botrytis.” While lees-friendly, the younger Rumpf is not a fan of extended fermentations when it comes to dry wines, so while these may begin fermenting spontaneously, they generally receive a subsequent dose of cultured yeasts and are finished fermenting by February. But Rumpf insists it would not have bothered him if one of his 2014s had kicked into malolactic, because there weren’t more than two or three grams of malic acid present in the musts.