2015 Riesling Oestricher Lenchen Kabinett

Peter Jakob and his son Peter Bernhard Kühn are among those growers who attribute the acid retention of their 2015 vintage Rieslings in large part to periods of vine shutdown resulting from the hot, dry summer. Yet levels of malic acid cannot have been all that high by the time the Kühns harvested, because their dry wines nowadays routinely undergo complete malolactic transformation, yet the 2015 results are not in the least overtly lactic or lacking in animation, clarity and refreshment. Those single-vineyard bottlings from 2015 that were in bottle already when I tasted at the Kühns’ in September 2016 had only been there for a month, rendering their consistently brilliant showings all the more remarkable. But it’s worth emphasizing that here is yet another instance where the 2015s as a group can only rival, not surpass, the wines from often unjustly overlooked 2014, from which the two Kühn Grosse Gewächse, in keeping with recent practice, were only bottled in mid-2016 and are reviewed below. (What Peter Jakob Kühn now designates his “Unikate” rather than Grosse Gewächse – namely, the dry Rieslings Landgeflecht and Schlehdorn – have now been allocated additional time in cask, and I shall report on those 2014s only after I have had time to assess them from bottle, which will be when I report on the majority of Kühn offerings from vintage 2016.) The superb sweet 2015s from Lenchen each represent separate successive pickings from selected parcels: the Kühns are among the German Riesling growers who prefer not to subject fruit, once harvested, to subsequent sorting. Incidentally, these pioneers in alternative bottle closures, who were committed to screw caps during the past decade, have had another conversion experience and will now be relying for all but their Gutsriesling on a line of corks that they are convinced meets their standards of organic and sustainable farming, absence of chemical intervention, and negligible TCA-contamination. (For more on the remarkable recent history of this estate and its evolving methodology, consult the extended introduction to my account of their 2014s.)