2017 Riesling Lieserer Niederberg Helden Auslese

Thomas Haag began picking his 2017s on September 25 – his earliest start ever. “I didn’t really want to begin quite that early,” he noted, “but I couldn’t afford to begin later, given how much surface area and how many parcels we now have to pick. We definitely had ripening in advance of an average recent vintage,” he added, “but not as much as you might think, because there was shutdown in many sites during midsummer, which is also why we were happy for the rain that came later and really jump-started things.” And despite his, as mentioned, extensive and far-flung array of vineyards as well as a need to make multiple passes on most of them to compensate for frost-engendered irregularity in ripeness, Haag and his crew still finished in exactly four weeks. Picking for his seven Grosse Gewächse lasted from October 7 to 20. Asked whether there was any problem with botrytis, he did not give the anticipated reply. His problem, it seems, was grapes of such rude good health that it took considerable effort, all of it in the first days of harvest, to scrape together nobly rotten material to inform a few upper-Prädikat elixirs of the sort that devotees of Schloss Lieser wine have come to expect. “Even this year’s Auslesen,” noted Haag, “are essentially from healthy fruit, and it’s only with gold capsule Auslese that significant botrytis comes into play.” Total crop loss, largely to frost, was about one-third vis-à-vis 2016.

The vintage 2017 Grosse Gewächse were bottled in mid-July 2018 and feature lower residual sugar than do Haag’s non-GG trocken Rieslings, for reasons one often hears expressed by German Riesling growers (though I have my doubts as to their validity): that lower residual sugar will allegedly enhance impressions of “minerality” while higher residual sugar enhances accessibility. This year’s Kabinetts are all only around 8% in alcohol and range in residual sugar between 55 and 60 grams, yet none come off as overbearingly sweet. The Spätlesen register only 7–7.5% alcohol, with sugar ranging well into the 80s Oechsle. Some of these residually sweet 2017s still harbored slightly stinky post-fermentative aromas many months after bottling, a phenomenon not uncommon at this address (or, notoriously, at Joh. Jos. Prüm) and, while seemingly capricious, seldom exhibited other than in high-fructose, spontaneously-fermented wines. (Germans in fact refer to such stinks collectively as “sponti aromas,” though only a minority of spontaneously fermented Rieslings exhibits them.) The affected wines will eventually shed their bit of stink, though occasionally that can take a couple of years.

As usual, there were some wines from the Schloss Lieser collection that I was unable to taste. Those include the Wehlener Sonnenuhr Grosses Gewächs and Auslese, along with a trio of wines (Grosses Gewächs, Spätlese and TBA) from a tiny holding in the fabled Bernkasteler Doctor. A Trockenbeerenauslese from the Niederberg Helden was still fermenting when I visited at the end of August, 2018 and had disappeared when I returned 12 months later. Incidentally, the 2016 Doctor Grosses Gewächs that I reviewed as part of my previous Mosel report was sold at the cellar door solely as part of a mixed “terroir case” – actually, a six-pack – that includes, with signed labels, the Grosse Gewächse from Wehlener Sonnenuhr, Graacher Himmelreich, Lieser Niederberg Helden, Brauneberger Juffer Sonnenuhr and Piesporter Goldtröpchen, while magnums of the Doctor Grosses Gewächs were auctioned. And Haag expects to maintain that sales regimen for future Doctor Grosse Gewächse. (For details about the history and methods of this estate, consult especially the introductions to my coverage of his 2014s and 2016s.)