2014 Riesling Niersteiner Hipping Grosses Gewächs

“Thirty-nine days non-stop, with any number of extra pickers" is how Caroline Gillot described the 2014 harvest. “Sure, we paused for rain,” she noted, “but were nearly always right back at it the same day. We ended up with only 38 hectoliters per hectare because we didn’t want to have any botrytis.” There was little skin contact and the musts were rigorously settled, “so we were surprised that the fermentations were so rapid. Even the Grosse Gewächse had finished by mid-December,” she reported.

I was not surprised to find her Ölberg Grosses Gewächs the most impressive bottling of this formidable collection, but was sorry to discover no old-vines Ölberg blend of Riesling and Traminer. The reason for the omission of this homage to an earlier era, Gillot explained, is that the two varieties ripened too far apart this year to be co-fermented, and the volume of Traminer on its own is so tiny that she blended it away into a generic cuvée.

This estate, which nowadays is run by Gillot and her husband Oliver Spanier jointly with his family’s Battenfeld-Spanier estate in the Wonnegau (also included in this report), enjoyed a justifiably fine reputation under the direction of her father, who is still very much involved. But the Guillot-Spanier regime has brought ever-greater clarity and more distinct personalities to wines that also reflect significantly expanded acreage in the best Nierstein slopes. The Gillots’ vines in their home town of Bodenheim (just north of Nackenheim, and with a long Riesling heritage of its own) now consist almost entirely of Pinot Noir, and I did not have a chance this year to taste the estate’s recent red wine releases.