2017 Riesling Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Kabinett

Johannes Selbach is among the minority of Mosel to report a successful rebound of secondary growth from an April frost that he acknowledged struck even steep sites where he had never before experienced frozen buds. Selbach’s team had already started harvesting Riesling on September 17, but he didn’t feel in any rush (the last day of picking was to be October 24), reporting that thanks to an early weeding out of less-than-desirable botrytis, subsequent fruit was either clean or quite nobly rotten – as witness a TBA, two BAs, and no fewer than nine different Auslesen, if one includes the three annual parcel-designated results of en bloc picking that are legally Auslesen even though the estate doesn’t refer to them by that name. So confident were the Selbachs in the fundamental healthiness of their late-ripening fruit that one parcel in Himmelreich was even left hanging for Eiswein and abandoned only when, come early January, a suitably deep frost had still not arrived. Selbach is keen to emphasize his sector’s having experienced just enough summer rainfall in 2017 to stave off drought stress or shutdown. “Sure,” he admitted, “it would have been nice if we’d gotten the big late summer rain two or three weeks earlier instead, but you can’t have it all.” Those last five words could also apply to a relative paucity of legally dry bottlings as well as a low total volume of off-dry Kabinett, a category that Selbach champions; but there are notable successes this vintage in nearly every category, and Selbach unhesitatingly characterized his 2017 collection as among the finest, if not the finest, in more than a quarter-century heading up his family’s estate.

I was not offered an opportunity to taste three of this collection’s Auslesen – a Schlossberg, a Wehlener Sonnenuhr and a “two-star” Zeltinger Sonnenuhr – nor a “no-star” Zeltinger Sonnenuhr BA. On a more prosaic note, I also missed out on the generic Kabinett and Spätlese. A “three-star” 2017 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese*** trocken, released in 2019, will be reviewed as part of my next report. (For an extended account of this estate’s recent history, its top sites and the evolution of its viticultural and cellar methodology, consult the introductions to my accounts of their vintage 2014 and vintage 2015 collections. Some important updates can be found in my introduction to coverage of the Selbach-Oster 2016s.)