The Keller 2009 Westhofener Kirchspiel Riesling Grosses Gewachs features pungent, piquant lime zest, peach kernel, and cherry pit allied to tart citrus and yellow plum, salt and chalk, all of which make for an almost fiercely penetrating and invigoratingly persistent if spare and lightly astringent performance. This certainly isn’t about flattery or ingratiation. German growers and critics love applying the word “puristic” to such a Riesling, which I suppose is better than “puritanical” – but my, is this wine strict! As it took on air, a slightly more enticing, saliva-inducing sense of salinity and shellfish reduction emerged. I don’t envision it ever achieving the delicacy and poise that its 2008 rendition displayed even at this young age, but it should certainly be fascinating as well as palate-stimulating to follow in the course of the coming decade. While Keller has now begun to implement the plan I discussed in issue 187 of releasing some Grosse Gewachse only in the year after bottling, that delayed release will not apply to either the Hubacker or Kirchspiel, although based on my perception of the latter’s personality, it above all should be considered as a candidate.
Klaus-Peter Keller’s stylistic ideals and parameters – for more about whose application to vintage 2009 consult the quotes from him at two places in my introduction to this report – were aptly realized in a collection of Grosse Gewachse (all bottled in mid-August) that ranged from 12.5-13.5% in alcohol. “I can always cut away bunches,” he remarked apropos yields. “That merely means extra work. But you can’t hang new bunches on your vines, and in warm years, to have that third or fourth one is critical” to avoiding too rapid an accretion of sugar. The cool temperatures by the time he harvested his top sites in early November not only, claims Keller, offered the ideal circumstances for phenolic evolution and acid retention, but also for gentle extraction in the initial hours after harvest, when the fruit received the period of maceration that he believes is essential to getting at “the two-thirds of Riesling’s aromas are in its skin.” And as if the rest of the wines did not represent a sufficiently amazing performance, it concludes with no fewer than four Trockenbeerenauslesen (5 were planned, but the grapes left in Hubacker got rained-out), about which Keller claims not to know for sure whether it represents a record for his estate (though it definitely does for the period of his tenure, and – unbelievably – he repeated that record again in 2010). “Day in, day out we sorted grapes into the night,” relates Keller, but it should be borne in mind that the quantities of each of these T.B.A.s – as I have noted in each tasting note – remained minuscule. Keller is excited about 2009’s potential with Pinot as well, but surveying his finished 2008 Spatburgunder – all of which were moved solely by gravity, a forklift having served to elevate their assembled volumes for bottling – there is more than enough excitement generated by those as well to merit a search of the marketplace and to offer wine lovers a striking glimpse of the quality levels to which German Pinot Noir can successfully aspire. I’ll report on the 2009 reds next year. (For more about Keller’s governing principles with Riesling as well as Pinot, consult the introduction to my notes on his wines in issue 187.)
Imported by Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608 9644, Dee Vine Wines, San Francisco, CA tel. (877) 389-9463, and Frances Rose Imports Inc., Huntley, IL; tel. (815) 382 9533
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