2015 Riesling Schlehdorn trocken

The Kühns and their vines experienced considerable adversity in vintage 2017. They were impacted by the April frost, although summer conditions served for surprisingly uniform ripeness considering there had been two generations of buds. They were also near the center of one of August’s violent hailstorms. Peter Bernhard Kühn swears that “out of our 95 parcels, 94 were hailed-on,” only the vines in Mittelheim being entirely spared. The crop had already incurred an aggressive green harvesting, so Nature’s additional savage crop-thinning had no up-side. Fortunately, grapes in Oestrich and Hallgarten had not yet begun to soften significantly when the hail hit; and just as in the sector of Rheinhessen’s Wonnegau that was struck later in the month, weather in the week following was dry and sunny enough that any shattered berries thoroughly dried-up. But just as at Keller and Wittmann, when it came time to harvest, many bunches had to be rejected; and in those that were retained, berries that had survived the storm but incurred minute dings and pits from hail had to be painstakingly picked-out. “We had to keep reminding our pickers to examine each cluster on both sides,” reports Kühn, “as well as to taste berries, in order to know what to retain and to ascertain exactly how best to perform the necessary operation" of removing unsuitable portions of clusters. In the end, Kühns had around half of a normal crop to show for one of the most labor-intensive harvest in their estate’s history. Picking began in earnest around September 20, like most of their colleagues, Kühns preferred to take advantage of the stable weather not in order to let already high must weight fruit hang further, but instead in order to complete harvest in as short a time as possible, which for them is just under three weeks. “It was humid,” notes Peter Bernhard, “and the potential for rot was definitely present.” And notwithstanding the perfect health reflected in the Kühns’ vintage 2017 dry wines or the rapidity with which the rest of their fruit was picked, they managed between mid-October and early November to garner an amazing Auslese as well as 35 liters of Beerenauslese. The latter, he insists, “is lying in our archive and won’t be offered for sale. Okay,” he relents, “maybe in ten years ....”

Young Kühn reports no major differences vis-à-vis a typical year in how the fruit from 2017 was processed or vinified, other than that the time allowed for skin contact in the press was generally reduced by around half, to just three or four hours. He was able to confirm that low yields do not explain the freakishly high extract that characterizes vintage 2017 wines because, as he notes, in Mittelheim where the vines were spared frost or hail and the yields perfectly normal, his 2017s not only feature high measurable extract, “they also exhibit a vintage character consistent with the wines from our other sites.” That so many of the top Kühn bottlings from recent vintages evince notable oak influence is due to Peter Bernhard’s desire that, for the most part, each cask should be utilized to raise wine from one particular site. Wood influence is fortunately buffered by the long time during which the top dry Kühn offerings remain on their full lees; and, just as at so many Rhine Riesling addresses of late, once the recent influx of new casks has subsided and been used repeatedly, woodiness will cease to be an issue. (All quotations in the notes that follow are from Peter Bernhard Kühn as opposed to his father Peter Jakob. For a wealth of background on this estate, its recent history, and its evolving methodology consult the introductions to my previous reports covering vintages 2014-2016.)