SaalwächterSilvaner Grauer Stein 2021 (750ml)

This is Carsten’s top Silvaner bottling from the oldest Silvaner vines at the estate, around 70 years old. Only tiny quantities are made; it is released after two years in barrel and then additional bottle-aging.

For all the grandiosity and fullness (albeit a disciplined fullness), the Silvaner “Grauer Stein” is broad-shouldered, yet taut and lean-feeling. There is so much salty density here while the wine is at once buoyant (upward looking) and incisive (downward looking). Carsten often talks about Silvaner as a phenolic grape, about the wine being as much about the architecture as the taste, and this is an uncanny flex into this aspect of the grape. Burly, fine, phenolic, elegant, deep, lean – none of this makes total sense, I admit, but this is the wine. While Carsten harvests neither particularly early nor very late, he does favor a very slow and serious pressing cycle – he wants the phenolics. The wines then see a mix of barrels, some new, some older and neutral, where they will normally age for a year – two years in this case. They are then blended into stainless steel tanks for about six months before they are bottled – a similar process is used at Wasenhaus and many more Burgundy-oriented estates. The wine is still silly-young – cellar if you can, otherwise decant or drink over a few days.