2016 Riesling Alte Reben

Christian Ebert lost half of his 2016 crop to peronospora, an outcome he blames on the group to whom he farmed out much of the responsibility for spraying his vineyards. While I pointed out in the introduction to my coverage of the Middle Mosel how surprisingly few instances I observed of prematurely elevated must weights due to drastic 2016 crop losses, many Schloss Saarstein vineyards clearly suffered that fate. Even some of the grapes selected for Kabinett had already reached 92 Oechsle. Fruit for this vintage’s Grosses Gewächs was the estate’s first-picked yet came in at well over 13% potential alcohol, whereas the estate’s precious 1943 planting, having been hand-sprayed by Ebert personally and hence yielding a nearly normal crop, only reached comparable must weight more than two weeks later and was picked last (as usual, becoming the estate’s flagship “Alte Reben” bottling). Acid levels, in contrast with must weights, seem to have tracked quite consistently here this year, and they are unusually high by vintage standards, with beneficial results. In covering the Saarstein 2015s, I praised Ebert’s willingness to allow many wines to finish fermenting uninterrupted and unassisted, with the result being halbtrocken or very discreetly sweet bottlings. In 2016, he reports, circumstances conspired to render musts and young wines reluctant to ferment to legal dryness. “When you have 70,000 liters of wine bubbling away in your cellar,” he explained, “that raises the ambient temperature significantly. So when you only have half a crop down there, it’s bound to stay pretty chilly, which inhibits completed fermentations.” A bit shockingly – albeit not that far from this estate’s statistical norm – virtually all of its 2016s were bottled by the end of February. (For more about this estate, its recent evolution, and its labeling practices – which do demand some explanation – consult the introductions to my reports on their 2014 and 2015 collections.)