At this point, with nearly all of Florian’s Grand Crus, it’s more a matter of allocating fairly than it is of selling, per se. Florian deserves the attention and we’re grateful to all of you for the passion. But we’re also wine dorks and there is a lot to say about the 2021 vintage and the evolution of dry Riesling in the Saar (and the Mosel).
The top Saar dry Rieslings simply have a fine-ness that one doesn’t find from most of the Mosel dry wines, with a few exceptions (including most of our growers to be honest – more than one person has noted that our Mosel estates seem to have the aesthetics of the Saar and this is most definitely true). For me, the 2020 GGs from Lauer were a revelation. Mind you, 2019 at Lauer was very, very good and the GGs are tops. But there was something magical about 2020.
And here’s where we come to an idea that seems like a contradiction – that maybe it is a contradiction? There are some great, great dry wines in 2021. Yes, with vintage 2021, for all the talk of it being a “Kabinett vintage” (much of this, originating here, I’m proud to say because I think it’s totally true), there are some simply bonkers dry wines as well. I’ve included the section on the dry Rieslings of 2021 from my vintage report, below, entitled, with a witty ironic edge: “I only drink dry wines.”
The short story is that while the thrust and bulk of the vintage, especially in the Mosel and Saar, produced an uncommon amount of absurdly good grapes for making Kabinetts, the ripeness levels one could reach were certainly good enough for making compelling dry wines. It’s a little bit like having a string of 100+ Fahrenheit days. “Damn, that’s hot,” you think to yourself. Then, you have a 75-degree day and it feels so cool and refreshing – you almost forget that 75 degrees is warm.
That, to some extent, is the story of 2021. Yes, it was cool compared to most vintages of the past two decades. But it was hardly anything like the cold vintages of the 1970s and 1980s. The vintage 2021, if you played the game correctly, was warm enough to make great dry wines. And while I think the warmer regions had a bit of a leg up in 2021, there is no easy narrative here.
I can’t say it’s a great dry vintage in the Saar – I simply haven’t tasted enough – but at least at Lauer it’s most definitely a very good / great GG vintage.
“Why is that, Stephen?” you fairly ask. My response is: “I honestly have no idea.”
Yet it is so. The wines are just fabulous, truly superb. They have *none* of the herbaceousness that even some of the Kabinetts had. They are deeply fruited (the Kupp has warming notes of melon, all the others have the stone fruit, citrus and citrus-oil profiles you’d expect, but they are cooler-toned and almost painfully focused) and they have such a compact density that they feel, in a way, like Kabinetts, that are totally dry.
That’s a very long introduction to say the wines taste like Kabinett Trockens, that most magical of genres, for me at least.
Then you look at the labels and they all say 13%. Huh? This is not exactly the signature of Kabinett Trocken. (For all you ultra-dorks, just so you know, Schonfels has only 12.9% alcohol, the Feils 13% and the Kupp 13.1%).
Yet how do they taste so incisive, so compact?
Again my now-classic response: “I honestly have no idea.”
But they do.
At the moment, in fact, these wines are so “Kabinett Trocken” that I would honestly beg people to give them as much time and space as possible. We opened the trio recently for the entire vom Boden group (as well as some collector-friends) and we all sat there in silence, trying to make sense of anything… the wines were simply too dense for any analysis.
They tasted like winter lightning bolts wrapped in citrus oil and sea salt. It’s like getting smacked in the face and asked to describe the texture of the skin on the hand that just slapped you.
Day two, however, cleaning up after our big dinner, I re-tasted the nearly-full bottles and they began to take on their unique shapes: the Feils dense yet expansive, micro-plush (if one can write that?), the Kupp complete and super-fine, the Schonfels pure mineral.
Late on day three they were just heartbreaking. So good that I drank all the remaining wines, even though I had told a colleague I’d save some for him and even knowing that, tomorrow, the wines would be even better.
I just couldn’t resist.
I really think this will be another monumental set of GGs from Lauer. They may be the best wines he made in the vintage, outside of the Kabinetts. But like the other misunderstood *great* dry vintages (like 2004, 2008, 2010, etc.) they are going to reward the patient.
An excerpt from the 2021 vom Boden vintage report: “I only drink dry wines.”
For those interested, you can find the full vintage report here.
It’s true that nearly all the focus of the 2021 vintage coverage has been, very much like this vintage report in fact, focused on the off-dry wines – the feinherbs and Kabinetts. This all makes sense; it’s the easy and powerful and, well, honest narrative.
With that said, I was shocked by the balance and poise of the dry wines. If you “only drink dry wines” (which is a crazy thing to do FYI), you’ll nonetheless be in very good shape in 2021 – perhaps you’ll have to be a bit more selective than normal, but there are wines out there for you. In fact, there will likely be some absolutely bonkers dry wines in 2021, as there were in 2004, 2008, etc. and so forth.
Remember that in many regions in Germany, the ripeness levels of the grapes were really not that far from the ripeness levels achieved in the warmer vintages like 2019 and 2020 – perhaps 90 Oechsle in 2019 and 2020 and 88 or 89 Oechsle in 2021. Off the top of my head I’d say places like the Nahe, Rheinhessen, Pfalz, Swabia and Baden have a leg up over the Mosel, Saar and Ruwer for dry wines, though I haven’t had enough dry Mosel wines yet to base this in all that much experience. Dry Rieslings also just require more time; when I was there in March tasting, many of the dry wines had only recently finished fermenting, or were just still in tank.
To some extent, the wines with a bit of residual sugar say more earlier; they are the first chapters and the dry wines are the conclusions. It is not for nothing that Keller doesn’t even release his top GGs (the Abtserde and Morstein) until the spring, after the spring, after the harvest. (Got that?)
What I do know is that in 2021, unlike say 2019 or 2020, growers had lots of perfect grapes for feinherbs and Kabinetts. To harvest a top dry wine in 2021, you had to wait. The harvests for the top dry wines took place at the end of October, after many growers had already picked a lot of their grapes, having sensed or tasted the absolute perfection of many of the grapes for Kabinetts and feinherbs. Thus, by the time mid- to late-October came around, and the grapes were perfect for dry wines, well, there likely weren’t as many grapes out there. This could also explain, to some extent, why there may be more great dry wines from the more southern regions. The Mosel, Saar and Ruwer have a stronger culture of off-dry wines, so growers there would have perhaps had an easier time making a higher-than-normal amount of such wines, while growers in the south would have felt safer making more dry wines.