2015 Riesling Maximin Grünhäuser Abtsberg Auslese

Carl von Schubert and his cellarmaster Stefan Kraml began harvesting one week into October 2015. The picking crew had been mustered 10 days earlier, but it was decided to give the grapes more time to shake off the whiplash of summer heat and drought followed by September rain, and von Schubert reported that must weights conveniently plateaued, allowing flavors to catch up. As my notes reveal, I found the residually sweet portion of this year’s collection the finest such group at this address in more than two decades, and decidedly superior to an assortment of ripe, well-crafted, site-typical but never quite exciting dry Rieslings. Quality at this fabled estate has been on a gradual rebound throughout the new millennium. One thing I still miss that was common here in the 1980s and early ‘90s is trocken or halbtrocken Rieslings that combine alcoholic levity with utmost transparency to herbal and mineral nuances and the spine to evolve fascinatingly for more than a decade. The dry Grünhaus 2015s come a little closer to that ideal than their 2014 counterparts did. Whether these great vineyards are still capable of rendering under current climatic conditions the sort of Rieslings I just mentioned is an open question. And perhaps it’s also questionable whether this is a type of wine that any significant share of today’s Riesling-drinking population craves. Among the welcome features of this year’s impressive non-dry wines is residual sugar so well judged that sweetness is the last thing on your mind while savoring them. (There were once again this vintage off-dry bottlings labeled “Superior,” but Carl von Schubert inexplicably neglected to present them to me and I became aware of their existence too late to remedy my oversight.)

With the January 2016 assumption (or, more specifically, the return) of this famous estate into the ranks of the VDP, certain changes were required to bring its labeling practices into accord with that organization’s strictures. It was obvious that von Schubert would begin offering his top dry-tasting wine from each of this estate’s renowned Einzellagen, Abtsberg and Herrenberg, as a legally trocken Grosses Gewächs. (In recent years, the top trocken bottlings had been distinguished by the designations “Alte Reben.”) In order to promote the preeminent stature of the Grosses Gewächs category within the VDP, that organization requires its members to abstain from bottling any trocken wines with the same vineyard designation as that of their Grosses Gewächs. (The organization could not care less how many different residually sweet Kabinetts, Spätlesen or Auslesen bear the same site designation in any given vintage.) This requirement poses a marketing challenge for estates that are “unlucky” enough to be vested almost entirely in “great” sites, especially if the Einzellagen in question are large and the share of dry wine high. The Abtsberg and Herrenberg make up more than 96 percent of Maximin Grünhaus acreage (the rest consisting of the tiny Bruderberg) and in recent years more than half of this estate’s production has been legally trocken. The Grünhaus “solution” to this marketing conundrum is certainly original (though don’t ask me how it squares with VDP intentions). Henceforth wines labeled simply “Abtsberg” or “Herrenberg” will not carry the designation trocken on their labels even though they fit the relevant analytic parameters. Von Schubert may now be in a position to advocate this approach at other estates, because less than eight months after joining the VDP-Mosel, he was elected its chairman. As a universally admired and legally trained estate owner previously uninvolved in VDP politics, he seems ideally placed to heal the wounds of an unpleasant mid-2016 row over potential invitees that saw the resignation of then-chairman Egon Müller and his vice-chair Nik Weis.