2019 Riesling Kanzemer Altenberg Spätlese Alte Reben

“Twenty-twenty was distinguished by extremely healthy grapes and moderate must weights right up until the end of harvest,” said Swen Klinger, thereby largely explaining why no Auslese and only a single Spätlese was produced. But there is more to the story. When I asked Klinger whether 2020 wasn’t a more relaxed harvest than 2019, he let out a long sigh. “There was that really dry summer again,” he observed, “which is something that doesn’t ordinarily please me,” and picking began just past mid-September, within only a few days of when the 2018 and 2019 harvests had commenced. “Then we checked the forecasts,” continued Klinger, and it was ‘rain, rain, and more rain.’” So, for the next week or so, the team here scrambled to collect as much potential Grosses Gewächs fruit as possible (resulting in just two bottlings), while also bringing in grapes for a full range of Kabinetts and a single Altenberg Spätlese. “It was the right decision,” related Klinger of the scramble, though he and Andreas Barth reported great relief that even after so much rain, the remaining grapes stayed largely healthy – the “seeds” of botrytis having evidently been eliminated by the summer drought – while slight dips in must weight as well as acidity (which was mostly tartaric, and at this address higher in 2020 than in 2019) proved relatively unproblematic. Proof of that is tasteable in the estate’s two largely late-picked generic bottlings of the vintage. “It was a little chaotic in the cellar with all that fruit coming in so rapidly,” related Klinger, “and we ended up fermenting everything in tank, even the Grosses Gewächs – though if you ask me why,” he added with a laugh, “I can’t exactly say. But there was some sense that the musts might be too filigreed in nature for exposure to wood. And filigree is part and parcel of our house style.” Needless to say, though, there were smiles at the overall results – especially what Klinger and Barth would (quite rightly, I think) call “genuine Kabinett,” a category they consistently champion – not to mention at the decent yields of 2020 after 2019’s penury.

Apropos of penury, Barth emphasized the role played in 2019 by low winter precipitation compared with that of the year before. The result was much greater vine stress from a summer that was almost equally hot and saw slightly more precipitation than 2018. Sites with more fine earth and thus superior moisture-holding capacity were favored, though that was more a matter of difference from one parcel to another rather than according to Einzellage. Barth said that at the time when the Grosse Gewächse were harvested, selecting out botrytis was not really a problem – not yet, at least. In the end, he and Klinger had good reason to be happy with their 2019 results and profess to finding the vintage’s combination of animation with ripeness and overall concentration to be singular. Yields were, of course, disappointing, but not as drastically reduced as at many estates, due to the share of von Othegraven vineyards that were spared the worst of the spring frost and to the relatively low incidence of sunburn. (From 2019, I did not taste the entire Von Othegraven portfolio. Missing were the generic and village-level bottlings, both trocken and feinherb, as well as the auctioned Altenberg Kabinett.)

Major news came in late 2021 that Barth would be departing von Othegraven after 18 years of dividing his time between there and his own Lubentiushof on the Lower Mosel. His tenure has been essential to von Othegraven’s resurgent reputation, but he leaves things in the hands of veteran vineyard manager and cellar right-hand Klinger, and it is uncertain whether Barth’s position will even be filled. (For details concerning this estate’s recent history, consult especially the introduction to my account of their 2014s.)