2014 Riesling Serriger Schloss Saarsteiner Auslese

Christian Ebert’s father, a refugee from East Germany, acquired the unbroken expanse of cliffhanging Schloss Saarstein’s vineyards in 1956. The younger Ebert has recently engaged in some significant replanting, but the estate’s single finest wine still consistently comes from vines planted in 1943 and still trained to single posts. This posed a challenge to Ebert, under pressure from the VDP and the market to begin bottling a Grosses Gewächs. His “Alte Reben” bottling already had its own reputation under that name, and to his credit Ebert did not want to put himself in a position where he “had to” manipulate that wine to reach legal Trockenheit -- the must from those 1943 vines sometimes finishes fermenting legally halbtrocken. Ebert’s solution to this conundrum is outlined in my review below of his first Grosses Gewächs. By distinguishing on his price list between dry wines labeled merely “Schloss Saarstein” and a Grosses Gewächs that, like all of the estate’s non-dry Prädikat wines, is officially identified as “Serriger Schloss Saarsteiner,” Ebert was able to observe VDP protocol without having to sacrifice geographical specificity on the labels of his non-Grosses Gewächs dry Rieslings. (Other VDP growers whose estates happen to be similarly dominated by a large monopole Einzellage are so not lucky with nomenclature.) As an indication of what sells, the current Schloss Saarstein price list offers with one exception only a single vintage of each dry wine, whereas one has a choice among four vintages of Spätlese (back to 2006) and six of Auslese (back to 2002 – not counting the numerous “gold capsule” Auslese bottlings). “We can’t sell a lot of Auslese,” conceded Ebert, “but on the other hand we need it to demonstrate the full potential of our site.”

As Ebert pointed out, a grower who can survey his or her entire vine acreage without leaving the house enjoys an enormous advantage in a vintage like 2014 where watchfulness and reaction time were critical to success. He noted that he has seldom fielded a collection with such low levels of volatile acidity as are found in his 2014s, a characteristic that certainly sets them apart from a great many of their peers and which he thinks will be conducive to slow bottle evolution and long keeping. Given their stability, many of the Schloss Saarstein 2014s did not receive any sulfur until just before bottling.