2014 Riesling Kanzemer Altenberg Spätlese Alte Reben

Since 2010, this estate – long renowned for its prime share of the great adjacent Kanzemer Altenberg – has belonged to Günter Jauch, a prominent German television presenter who quite by chance learned that the property, which he had visited often as a child and which had been in his extended family since the Napoleonic secularization, was up for sale. Another relative, Dr. Heidi Kegel, had spent most of the two previous decades attempting to reestablish the quality standards that prevailed here through the mid-1970s and to mop up the red ink. In the former endeavor at least, she made significant progress, especially after bringing in Andreas Barth in 2006 to manage the vineyards and cellar. The estate has recently expanded beyond its home base and Ockfen vineyards to include, among other things, a share of Wiltinger Kupp, though inexplicably I wasn’t shown wines from that site as part of my 2014 vintage tasting and did not subsequently catch up with any. Barth insisted that he found the 2014 vintage here relatively unproblematic when compared with the situation at his own Lubentiushof, immediately upriver from Koblenz. He reported largely clean fruit from the von Othegraven vineyards and botrytis that, when it did come, was relatively late and noble. I found similar challenges reflected at the lower-priced end of both collections, but Barth’s skill and the inherent quality of the best von Othegraven sites combined to create some impressive bottlings, especially among the collection’s unapologetically sweet offerings. Both Barth and Jauch have recently noted a significant recent uptick in interest among their younger compatriots in the estate’s non-dry Rieslings, particularly the Kabinetts, accompanied by an increasing willingness among chefs and sommeliers to demonstrate that genre’s versatility. Each vineyard-designated wine here, incidentally, tends to reflect a single picking from a single parcel, and only rarely will lots that differ significantly from one another be blended.