2014 Weisser Burgunder vom Loesslehm trocken

Hansjörg Rebholz calls 2014 “a splendid [grossartiger] vintage”—one of the most ringing endorsements I heard from any German grower. “The rain that we got here in the southern Pfalz at the end of June was really perfect,” he opined, given that the vines were beginning to stress under heat and dryness, “but not too much rain the way that Riesling regions further north had. The upshot of the cool, moist weather in the second half of the growing season was, for us, refined, precise, elegant, almost filigree wines with high levels of tartaric acid, very low levels of finished alcohol, and so much minerality in the top Rieslings that they almost seem fragile, yet they have grandiose structure.” Certainly the combination of ripe flavors and palpable extract-richness with alcoholic buoyancy that characterizes the best of these is striking. (Even the Grosse Gewächse weigh in on one side or the other of 12%.) “And one of my main reasons for converting to biodynamics,” added Rebholz, “was to achieve just this combination.”

Picking here lasted barely four weeks, from mid-September to mid-October, with Riesling confined to the October half. Yields with Riesling, though, ended up at only around two-thirds of a normal harvest, albeit considerably more generous than in vintage 2013, an unusually difficult year for the southern Pfalz. “Most of the sites were pre-harvested to remove botrytis from grapes that weren’t yet ripe,” noted Rebholz. “Later botrytis, on ripe grapes, you can tolerate. But if you don’t remove the early botrytis and you then try to harvest everything at one time, you can’t see which bunches were botrytized early and need to be discarded, and which late. The pre-harvest takes around 200 man-hours per hectare, but if you do this then the actual harvest goes much faster. And really, we have to do that pre-harvest if we are going to accomplish a perfect subsequent harvest of all of our vineyards before running out of time.”

As usual, I found the several “R”-series white wines that Rebholz raises in small barrels—prominently French, but some Austrian, and featuring a small share of Pfalz oak that he himself selects—too resinous and too dried by their wood exposure to more than tepidly recommend. “Chardonnay used to be about oak and toasting even here,” admitted Rebholz, but he insisted that “now I am trying to capture coolness, clarity, refinement and minerality that too much new wood or alcohol would blur. And a wine like my 2014 Chardonnay is a lot more fun to drink at this youthful stage than were the corresponding 2008 or 2004—and those are absolutely my other two favorite vintages of recent times.” Perhaps I’m insensitive to this evolution, or perhaps Rebholz is speaking more of goals than accomplishments. I offer notes here on current Pinot Noir releases (all of which are bottled at 22 months but released much later) so as to record in greater detail my reservations about that portion of Rebholz’s portfolio, a portion that, I hasten to emphasize, is widely lauded among German critics, and to which it is possible that I have an idiosyncratic aversion.