2013 Riesling Schlehdorn trocken

Oestrich grower Peter Jakob Kühn had acquired a considerable reputation by the early1990s, after he and his wife Angela had spent more than a decade rebuilding his family’s estate. But that early notoriety came at the price of personal dissatisfaction and financial peril. Early in the new millennium, Kühn undertook a viticultural and stylistic revolution that involved scrupulously organic and eventually biodynamic farming to respect nature’s contingencies, conform to her rhythms, and achieve maximally self-regulating vines. In the cellar, the new approach involved maceration; spontaneous fermentation; expanded use of traditional 1,200-liter Stückfässer (more recently from local Taunus oak selected on site by Austrian master cooper Franz Stockinger); long lees contact; very late and low doses of sulfur; and late bottling: for the single-vineyard wines only after 10-22 months. Dry wines were allowed to ferment to nearly absolute dryness and in the process to also undergo malolactic transformation, two characteristics that Kühn views as essential to nature completing her work and finding “repose and equanimity” [Ruhe und Gelassenheit] as well as to bottling wines that will be stable and evolve expressively over many years. For a while it must have seemed to an outsider if not also to him that Kühn had bought himself even more trouble, since many of his customers couldn’t accommodate themselves to an abrupt stylistic transition. But with hindsight and an international perspective, Kühn’s drastic departure from local norms appears as part of larger trends, and gradually his wines have won greater recognition than ever before. Sweet wines, with which Kühn is also strikingly successful, have hewn closer to a conventional approach, being rendered in tank; stopped at high levels of residual sugar by means of filtration and sulfuring; and bottled before summer. Son Peter Bernhard Kühn took the lead in my most recent tasting session, in the course of which he addressed the methodological and (to the Kühns arguably more important) metaphysical disconnect between the estate’s dry and sweet wines, concluding that “we are making too many compromises on account of all the technical preparations involved with our sweet wines, and we really ought to be exploring a different way with them.” A second Kühnian Revolution (or a completion of the first) may thus be imminent. There is also much to look forward to from an expansion of the estate’s holdings in Hallgarten, where an existing base in the Hendelberg, a legacy of the late (and for some of us still very much lamented) Jakob Riedel estate, is being supplemented by recent plantings in the Jungfer and Schönhell vineyards.

In both 2013 and 2014, the advantages that Kühn attributes to his brand of vineyard management seem to be boldly advertised, since extremely challenging growing seasons have resulted in wines of extraordinary clarity, complexity and energy. “When we hand-harvest,” explains the younger Kühn, “it takes at least one day per hectare, and the harvest in 2014 lasted three and a half or four weeks, beginning with a pre-harvest to sanitize the vineyards. Then we returned with two groups, one of experienced old hands to remove any remaining imperfections and a second to come behind with two separate buckets for sorting by quality. It was something of a battle,” he adds, but obviously one in which, unlike most growers, the team here had the luxury of deliberating rather than simply rushing to salvage their crop. Once fruit started collecting, Kühn continues, “you really couldn’t so much go by the appearance of the grapes in determining quality; you had to rely on tasting the must and on intuition.” The Kühns trusted the condition of their grapes to permit skin contact, as usual, before pressing, even though they had no way of cooling the grapes but were only able to apply refrigeration to the resulting juice. Nor did they attempt to clarify the musts beyond their usual practice of light sedimentation. I have not included notes from cask on promising 2014s that were only due to be bottled well into 2016. By the same token, I have reviewed for the first time below those of the Kühn 2013s that were only bottled and released in 2015.