On Thursday, April 22nd we drove down to the small village of Flörsheim-Dalsheim in the heart of the Rheinhessen for our annual pilgrimage to Weingut Keller…an equivalent to Weil in the Rheingau, Dönnhoff & Schönleber on the Nahe, J.J. Prüm on the Mosel, Egon Müller on the Saar and Maximin Grünhaus & Karthäuserhof on the Ruwer. Damn good company!
We were greeted warmly by our hosts Julia and Klaus-Peter and proceeded to taste through 90% of Keller’s 2009′s.
In 2009, 90% of Keller’s wines were dry, with the Grosses Gewächs such as Kirchspiel, Hubacker, Abtserbe and Morstein leading the way! Although Klaus-Peter made Rieslings that run the gamut of dry to sweet, these dry and off-dry wines stole the show, simply because they were more approachable and more finished than the fruitier, sweeter wines.
As I review my notes, terminology such as “mineral bombs”, “jewel-like”, “clean and perfectly ripe”, “creamy textures” keeps popping up throughout the range of wines. (Klaus-Peter’s grandfather, aged 84, claimed, when he saw the condition of the 2009 grapes, that he had only twice before seen fruit of such perfectly ripe caliber.) Granted, the dry wines were further along in terms of their development than the sweeter ones, but all the wines had a remarkable purity to them.
There is one Spätlese from Kirchspiel that was so perfectly balanced you could happily drink it immediately, although it would not be bottled until probably late May/early June. The fruitier wines tended to be more closed up aromatically speaking than the dry wines, but all of them were totally beguiling examples of Riesling; the likes of which exist nowhere else in the world, and that includes Austria and France. (New world Rieslings don’t even approach this exalted standard of excellence!)
They made a pair of stunning Auslesen: one from Kirchspiel, the other from Morstein, which is the bigger, richer wine…followed by an intriguing “Cuvee Beerenauslese” comprised of Rieslaner and Scheurebe grapes–a very exotic, bizarre and magnificent wine by any standards! (This will probably become an auction wine at some point, and is well worth pursuing!)
Perhaps the finest of all the big dry wines was the “G-Max” cuvee of which a mere 1,300 bottles were produced. This is a major rarity on a par with Raveneau’s “Les Clos” in Chablis, and the utterly superb quality warrants such a comparison!
Klaus-Peter, who worked a harvest at Rousseau, is not at all lost on red wine, specifically Pinot noir, but he makes so little that it’s almost not worth mentioning except that when German Pinot (Spätburgunder) sees used La Tache barrels it IS worth mentioning!
Our evening concluded with a BYOB dinner party in the kitchen of the Keller home with about 12 small courses cooked by a young sous chef from Piesport on the Mosel, who had worked at the Michelin three star restaurant, Klaus Erfort, in Saarbrücken…just exactly the sort of thing you need to enhance your next “Bottle Party”!
Cheers! - Dade
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