2015 Riesling Filzener Kabinett

The estate nowadays run by Claus Piedmont was one of many that came to prominence during the late-19th-century heyday of Mosel wine and among the founders of the forerunner to today’s VDP. But it has kept an exceedingly low profile in recent years – until a few months ago, the last time I’d tasted any wine from here was in the 1980s, and there had been no US representation for at least a decade – all the while shrinking the surface area that is family-farmed, from 15 acres through the 1990s, to the fewer than six today that constitute the monopole Filzener Pulchen. That Right Bank site, together with the neighboring Urbelt, represents the Saar’s last vineyards before it empties into the Mosel a mile and a half downstream. (Two other significant estates are also located in tiny Filzen: once-renowned Reverchon, bought out of bankruptcy and revived in 2007; and A. Schmitt, recently expanded to include Serrig acreage under the new name “König Johann.”) In the 1990s, Piedmont received some attention in the wine press – much of it positive – for having taken the radical step by Saar and Mosel standards of reducing annual offerings to a half dozen or fewer, all bottled by early spring, and that has not changed since. The wines ferment spontaneously in a mixture of tank and fuder, a notable feature – as my notes make clear – being extremely modest levels of residual sugar in the residually sweet Kabinetts, a welcome throwback to Saar and Mosel Riesling of the 1980s, and presumably something that has remained constant here in the interim. The estate also offers some legally dry wine, but without visiting, I tasted only bottlings recently selected by their new US importer, all of them discreetly sweet and – a bit surprisingly give this estate’s practice of early bottling – only one of those (even on the importer’s early 2018 offering) from vintage 2016. As a VDP member, Piedmont has recently reorganized its offerings, notwithstanding their common vineyard origin, into generic, village-designated and vineyard-designated.