2015 Riesling Bopparder Hamm Engelstein Grosses Gewächs

This near next-door neighbor of Weingart is often spoken of in German circles as the foremost grower of his entire region, so I really should attempt to visit him more regularly. Müller and his wife took over his family’s then just 10-acre estate in the late 1990s and gradually expanded it to encompass 42 acres in the four prime, south-facing Einzellagen of the Bopparder Hamm. Their two sons are becoming increasingly involved, and his parents are still active, circumstances that probably help explain how such a large estate can be tightly controlled by one family. (Müller farms out to other growers the day-to-day responsibility for a few parcels distant from his home base and destined for generic bottlings.)

“It’s the fate of slate" [schicksal des schiefers], says Müller in a nice turn of phrase, “to suffer stress during dry periods like we had in the summer of 2015. That’s where our estate has an advantage with our mostly old vines.” (In the Bopparder Hamm, “old” means dating to the early 1970s, following one of the earliest and most thorough of German Flurbereinigungen. The endless ancient terraces that had marked this landscape were deemed commercially unsustainable.) “We found ourselves able to take our time,” says Müller of the 2015 harvest, “making up to three passes through any given parcel.” Must weights and acid levels moved only moderately in the course of October, he told me, but flavors improved, and unlike some other Mittelrhein growers, Müller reported virtually no problematic botrytis. In fact, he took so much time that the harvest wasn’t finished until late November, and the late results are among Müller’s most impressive.

Dry and off-dry wines here get six or eight hours of pre-fermentative skin contact; usually but not always ferment spontaneously; are raised in tank; and generally get bottled in April. The Müller wines are flatteringly fruit-forward and tend to accentuate the tropical characteristics often associated with Mittelrhein Riesling, with the dry 2015s occasionally reflecting a bit more ripeness than is good for them (both in terms of flavor and of finished alcohol).

A VDP member since 2007, Müller has had to accommodate his labeling to fit that association’s notoriously Procrustean bed, substituting alternative names for formerly Prädikat-designated dry wines, and dropping vineyard designations to accommodate a “village-level” tier on the “VDP Classificatory Pyramid.” He is contemplating the registration of one or more cadaster site names so as to sidestep the VDP’s restriction of Grosse Lage names to a single dry wine. Meanwhile, there is only one Müller Grosses Gewächs bottling. The designation “S” on many Müller labels signifies wines deemed to be of especially high quality, which used to be labeled “Spätlese Trocken” or “Spätlese Halbtrocken.” “But we don’t render separate ‘S’ bottlings from each individual vineyard every year,” Müller explained. “It depends on the potential of the vintage.” The designation “feinherb,” it should be noted, is employed by Müller as essentially synonymous with the formerly employed “halbtrocken,” meaning that wines so designated typically taste virtually dry. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time during my visits here to request a tasting of older wines. My conservative, at times even skeptical, suggested drinking windows are thus based more than usual on intuition; and it should be noted that some of Müller’s laudatory countrymen make a special point of referring to his Rieslings as long-lived.