2014 Riesling Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Kabinett

Johannes Selbach worked actively alongside his father Hans for a quarter of a century and has since perpetuated a legacy of well-balanced dry and judiciously sweet Rieslings. In the course of their tenure, Johannes and his wife Barbara have overseen the expansion of their family’s estate from only a few hectares to nearly two dozen today, and beyond the communal bounds of Zeltingen, all the while running the family’s sizeable négociant arm and acting as commissioners and brokers for wines estate-bottled by an enormous number of quality-conscious growers from all regions of Germany. The family has long employed an oenologist as full-time cellarmaster to assist them, and has chosen wisely (most recently taking-on Christian Vogt after he left the Karthäuserhof). Fermentations chez Selbach can be spontaneous or assisted by cultured yeasts, depending on circumstances. Most of the top wines are raised in fuder, but whether in cask or tank, they usually stay on their fine lees until just before bottling which generally takes place in late spring or early summer but can sometimes last into September.

Johannes Selbach has long been a critic of overly sweet or otherwise (in his words) “exaggerated” Rieslings, positioning himself as a guardian of “true Kabinett.” In 2003, he began showcasing wines that represented en bloc, one-time picking of an entire parcel as opposed to the long-established practice among top estates of selectively picking in tranches to segregate grapes with different degrees of ripeness or botrytization. Choosing a single moment to harvest whatever nondefective fruit is hanging means rendering wines that in a distinctive sense reflect the unique nature of each growing season, and that some (including Selbach) would argue also more distinctively reflect terroir. The sites chosen by Selbach for this approach were a portion of his holdings in the Rotlay sector of Zeltinger Sonnenuhr and his top parcels in Schlossberg and later in Himmelreich, known respectively as Schmitt and Anrecht. (The latter correspond with the sole sections of their respective Einzellagen that were classed in the top two tax categories by Prussian tax assessors.) In 2011, a second such designate within Schlossberg, Bömer, was added to the roster. Selbach labeled each such wine, albeit discreetly (in hope of not upsetting the authorities), with the relevant parcel name. Initially, these wines, all of which were distinctly sweet, bore no Prädikat. Subsequently, in view of the overall level of ripeness achieved by the time of picking and the frequency of botrytis, not to mention their sweetness, Selbach began labeling these products of block-picking as Spätlese or Auslese, at the same time giving their specific vineyard names new prominence on the labels, emboldened both by the blind eye and green light that the VDP had begun giving their members to introduce non-Einzellage site designations, and subsequently by 2014 legislation permitting growers to register as vineyard designations any cadastral site names. (That said, if Selbach wanted to officially register the relevant parcels, the spellings of “Rotlay” and “Anrecht” would have to change and “Schmitt” – a name simply referring to a previous owner – would have to be replaced.)

“Late deleafing was key to warding off rot,” related Selbach, whose team as usual also engaged in widespread preharvest culling of imperfect or retarded bunches. He reports that the best portions of Schlossberg and Sonnenuhr held out especially well and long against the encroachment of botrytis. “We started picking with high hopes on September 26th,” but by the end of October, he noted, “we were completely worn out and happy that the harvest ordeal was finally over. The later it got, the less there was to harvest and the more we had to discard. My instructions were [he switched here to English]: ‘If in doubt, throw it out!’ About the time when we thought we could see the finishing line, we realized that things had started going in the wrong direction. We weren’t going to be able to salvage any more top-quality grapes, and it was already time to call it quits.” But if that sounds like the account of a disappointing vintage, the bottled results here entirely belie such an interpretation. Early pickings delivered an abundance of admirably fresh, clear, delicious Kabinetts – “you get a small window of opportunity for these nowadays and it takes special efforts,” noted Selbach – while the estate’s stringency of selection shows in the exceptional quality of many later-picked Spätlese bottlings that feature a flattering measure of botrytis. “Of course even for the single-parcel bottlings we had to discard a lot of inferior fruit, but they were still block-pickings in the sense that we only went through once, taking fruit at various stages of ripeness and botrytization. Believe me,” he added, “when we were picking any of these 2014s, I didn’t imagine that we were going to achieve such clarity in the wines. Fermentations went smoothly and 85 percent of them were entirely spontaneous.” There are no wines “above” Auslese, nor any dedicated botrytis selections, because although Selbach (using the characteristic expression in Mosel dialect) testified that for several days “wir piddelten” – meaning “we laboriously and desperately picked out and scraped together shriveled berries” – what came out of the press was “too fat” and betrayed too much gray rot.