2018 Riesling Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Kabinett

The Selbachs began picking Pinots (and Gewürztraminer) on September 4 and then launched almost immediately into Riesling. Even so, they did not manage to harvest a residually sweet Kabinett from the Wehlener Sonnenuhr – though there are two others – because fruit in that site was deemed already too ripe to suit the genre. Yet despite the shockingly early start, harvest here only concluded on October 18. This is among the few addresses in 2018 where botrytis led to a large and impressive array of nobly sweet bottlings. The damming of the Mosel at Zeltingen makes for an especially wide, still stretch of water underneath the Zeltinger and Wehlener Sonnenuhr Einzellagen from which rising mists can infiltrate the bunches, but the catalytic factor in 2018 appears to have been a very localized enhancement of September rain, and one can certainly not discount the determination of a team specialized in the art of botrytis selection and given ample time to operate. In keeping with a recent retro fashion, Johannes Selbach reactivated a basket press with which he recalled his father having let him process a child’s first Beerenauslese back in 1975. Decidedly non-retro is a spacious new processing facility – adjoining the estate’s first-ever tasting room (really a huge hall) – that includes a much larger grape-cooling chamber (though even so, Selbach reported his first-ever use of dry ice to supplement) and an additional press, features ideally suited for addressing 2018’s warm September weather and bumper crop. “Bumper” applies equally to this collection’s nobly sweet offerings. “In that sense, too, this is an exceptional year,” observed Barbara Selbach, “because usually we have Beerenauslesen or Trockenbeerenauslesen only in homeopathic quantities, but here we were even able to split the Sonnenuhr TBA into two lots, one of which was raised in a 500-liter cask.”

If one adds in the estate’s usual three block-picked and parcel-designated bottlings that are officially Auslesen, there are at least nine Selbach-Oster wines of that Prädikat from 2018! Vintage 2018 Selbach-Oster wines that I was not given an opportunity to taste and was unable to subsequently procure very unfortunately include not just the Pinot Blanc, the Gewürztraminer and two generic Rieslings, but also the Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Spätlese, both “one-star” and “no-star,” and the Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Beerenauslese. I’ll try to make up at least some of those deficits on another occasion. The aforementioned cask-raised Sonnenuhr TBA was deemed not yet ready for presentation at the time of my last, late November 2019 tasting session. (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 the vintage 2014 and vintage 2015 collections. Some important updates can be found in my introductions to subsequent Selbach-Oster coverage.)