2016 Riesling Kanzemer Altenberg Spätlese Alte Reben

The purity and clarity that on the whole characterize von Othegraven’s 2016 collection reflect what director Andreas Barth reports was impeccably healthy fruit, and I have never taken so much pleasure in this estate’s Grosse Gewächse as on this occasion. Picking began at the end of the first week of October to ensure genuinely lightweight Kabinetts, but the harvest, which Barth’s estate manager Swen Klinger described as having been “relaxed,” lasted for nearly a month. The Grosse Gewächse were bottled in late summer and tasted in mid-September; the other wines were mostly bottled in late spring and were tasted in early August. I realized too late that the von Othegraven portfolio had been enlarged from vintage 2016 by the addition not just of a Wawerner feinherb but of two other feinherb offerings that I also didn’t taste: a generic Kabinett and a bottling from contract fruit. (For details concerning this estate’s recent history, consult the introduction to my account of their 2014s.)