2017 Riesling Graacher Domprobst Auslese A.P. #15

Wine Details
Place of Origin

Germany

Graach

Mosel

Color

Sweet White

Grape/Blend

Riesling

Reviews & Tasting Notes

00

Drinking Window

2020 - 2050

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Few if any growers with whom I met suffered worse crop loss in 2017 than Willi and Christoph Schaefer, whose vineyards were hit by frost and hail as thorough and damaging as any that either could recall, and whose stringent standards prompted them to reject much of what was eventually left hanging. Apropos of that hail, Christoph Schaefer observed that what made it so damaging was not just that the grapes were already softening, but also that relatively light hailstones inflicted the proverbial thousand minor cuts, leaving berries whose scarred skin would have made for bitter wine. Savage storms and huge hailstones have been known to inflict localized damage and strip away whole berries or parts of clusters, he explained, but in early August 2017, the effect was pervasive and insidious. And as he further pointed out, one can only perform so much quasi-surgical removal of hail-struck berries or breaking apart of clusters to remove rot-tainted ones; so at the end of the day a lot of clusters were simply cut to the ground as too risky to pick. The last days of September 2017 saw an initial pass on many vineyards for fruit that would inform Kabinetts, while the gathering of further Kabinett-destined material as well as the Spätlese harvest occupied the first half of October.

Christoph Schaefer reported having been surprised to discover that the point at which taste led him to stop the fermentation of his sweet 2017s turned out to be at lower residual sugar than in 2016, let alone in similarly high-acid 2015. His suspicion is that this can be explained by the buffering capacity of 2017’s high extract. And he thinks extract also explains how “what looked to us initially as if it would be a svelte [schlanker] vintage turned out to exhibit such length, depth and structure, but still elegance and levity.” How this vintage’s high acidity and extract would have expressed themselves in dry wines will remain moot. With barely half the normal volume, at an estate whose acreage never begins to cover the demand for its wines, the Schaefers elected to render only residually sweet wines of the sort for which they are renowned. And the quality of fruit that they harvested was so high that they also dispensed with any generic or non-Prädikat bottling, ending up with just eight wines in total. By my reckoning, the last time there were so few seems to have been 1991, another penurious harvest and another high-acid collection that included a glorious, solitary Auslese. (For considerable detail about this estate and its evolution, consult the introduction to my accounts of their 2014s and 2015s.)