by Al Drinkle
2021 is a highly attractive vintage for German Riesling, but not exactly in the way that I thought it would be. Insofar as we can discuss “2021 Riesling” as if it's one simple thing, I would encourage you to henceforth assume that I'm talking about the successful results, as it must be acknowledged that not everybody made good wine. I taste with very talented winegrowers, but given an investigatory sampling of purchased bottles produced by estates with whom I was either unfamiliar or hadn't experienced in some time, 2021 seems to be a year of commendable highs and frequent lows. While therefore remaining agnostic to its general qualitative potential, I can say that 2021 will possibly become my favourite vintage of the last decade. Cryptic enough? Let's investigate…
In September of 2021, I sought four or five days of solace in Germany with the intention of clearing my mind in the splendour of the vineyards. However, being a fanatic, I ended up spending all my time with winegrowing friends who, depending on their age, were engaged in one of the most daunting growing seasons of their careers. As one put it, “we've seen frost, hail, a massive abundance of rain, the absence of summer, constant rot pressure and, now that grapes are struggling to ripen, the hungriest birds in memory.” It goes without saying that the greatest tragedy of 2021 was the “once-in-a-millenium” July flood that caused immeasurable damage to wineries, homes and infrastructure—and the loss of over 100 lives—in the Ahr Valley, as well as pockets of the Mosel. The devastation of these areas will be evident for many years to come.
During my September visits, Oliver Müller of Wagner-Stempel and Eva Fricke of her eponymous winery reported that the growing season had pushed the efficacy of organic farming to the very limits. Johannes Weber at Hofgut Falkenstein reinforced this, joking that they had chosen the least viable year ever to begin their organic certification. (All three would later assert great satisfaction with the results of their farming, despite their success being so precarious at times). In these vineyards and elsewhere, the battle against peronospora in particular was exhausting, and it was clear from much earlier on that regardless of the results, yields would be severely compromised for anybody who wanted to make palatable wine. At the same point in 2020 (not to mention 2018 and 2019), the Riesling harvest was underway at many addresses, but in 2021 the growers were hoping for at least three or four weeks of benign weather—the likes of which they hadn't yet seen that season—in hopes that they could fully ripen their grapes¹. The growing season started late, summer had simply not materialized, and a beautiful autumn could be the only saving grace². What none of the growers knew is that for the next two months, Mutter Natur would shine upon them, allowing for a slow, steady ripening and a prolonged harvest for their reduced but henceforth healthy crop of Riesling.
¹Only Kai Schätzel, with his unorthodox but highly successful farming techniques, was harvesting Riesling—albeit for featherweight kabinett—by the time I returned home on September 17th.
²A survey of the vineyards of both Siefersheim, Rheinhessen and Dhron, Mosel at this point revealed the disturbing fact that many growers had actually given up! Their dismal, rot-infested vineyards had simply been abandoned for the rest of the season!
Kai Schätzel in a plot of the Hipping vineyard in Nierstein.
The contrast between the forlorn stress of the growers last September, and the ubiquitous smiles in late-April couldn't have been greater. Sometime in between, I received one message after another asserting the unbelievable—that the 2021 growing season had ended well, and that despite compromised yields, everybody was happy with the healthy, modestly ripe fruit that they had harvested. It's worth noting that most of the growers with whom we work are below a certain age, and that such a vintage presented a completely different set of challenges from what they were used to. However, Helmut Dönnhoff, veteran that he is, reminded us that up until the late '80s, the struggle for ripeness and cleanliness was routine.
The battle for ripeness in 2021 was very real, and not easily won. Harvest went late into autumn, with much of the Riesling destined for the top dry wines harvested in mid-November. One might assume that, just like their Burgundian colleagues who so many of them confusingly worship, many German winegrowers resorted to chaptalization and/or deacidification in order to craft the wines that they desired. Of course these adjustments, the likes of which are very common in much more revered cellars of France, are not desirable topics of conversation for most winegrowers, and I didn't press the issue. But it’s safe to say that some growers adjusted their wine in these ways.
Along with three colleagues, each of whose palates I implicitly respect and trust, I arrived in Germany in late April this year, naively expecting to taste a vintage of a particular sort. I anticipated that compared to the last several years, ripeness, and therefore alcohol levels would be lower, and that acidity would be more pronounced. I foresaw fruit profiles of a cooler register, and that there would finally be a paucity of lavish, exotic or tropical aromatics. As an extension of this, I expected an enhanced degree of euphemistic minerality (a vacuous word, sure, but you know what I'm talking about). I envisioned slender introductory wines, a more honest representation of prädikat levels where relevant, and less bombastic expressions of dry wines from great vineyard sites. In short, I anticipated that the cooler growing season would have engendered collections of Riesling that were proportionately dialed back compared to recent norms, with fresher aromatic and flavour profiles. Some of the time I was right in some of these ways, but there were surprises in store for me.
Right from my very first sample of 2021 Riesling, an important theme would be established. The aforementioned abundance of water during the growing season unlocked a cocktail of soil nutrients—nitrogen being the most important—that the vines had been deprived of for a few years. I continued to be amazed by the resulting levels of palpable dry extract, and continued to be told that, following drought conditions, this was an expected consequence of a well-hydrated season with small yields. The only recent parallel on paper might be 2016, although 2016 followed one warm and dry growing season, not three, and the young '16s didn't feel anything like this! The '21s seem to emulate the modest palate-weight of the '16s, but with a concentration of extract akin to 2017. Beyond this, the ‘21s don’t remind me of either of those vintages in any important ways.
Another consequence of the weather, and perhaps one that should have been expected, is that in the case of several fruity wines (assuming that they were harvested comparatively early), the acid profile was unfamiliar because it featured an acceptable but discernible degree of malic acid which we haven't seen in some years³. We'll discuss the various Riesling styles and their corresponding tendencies towards success in time, but where there’s a confluence of inordinate dry extract, the presence of malic acidity and ripe fruit flavours, we've got some wild and potentially exciting wines on our hands.
³In warmer vintages (which have become the norm in Germany as elsewhere) and given adept control of vigour on part of the grower, Riesling rather effortlessly tends to ripen to the point where the amount of malic acidity, compared to the riper tartaric, is negligible. I like that the German word for malic acid is apfelsaure, referencing “apples”, and in the case of Riesling, certain levels of the crunchy malic acid are acceptable, and even appealing, depending on the other components of the wine and how the final balance is achieved.
Johannes Weber of Hofgut Falkenstein, in front of Krettnacher Euchariusberg.
The headline, despite my refusal to mention it until the ninth paragraph, is that the cooler growing season of 2021 offered a very welcome expression of German Riesling. There are many positive things to be said about the three previous hot vintages (and I've said them), but I don't think that any German wine lover on the planet had their fingers crossed for a tetralogy of heat. The '21s have a distinct purity of aroma and an arresting vividity of flavour. Curiously, the spectrum of descriptors aren't restricted to the cooler side of things, but nor do they ever flirt with tropicality. I was surprised by how often I noted raspberries and strawberries, not to mention warm hay, quince, peach and bosc pear. But these are mere components of wines that are silver and floral in spirit with marine tones and allusions of mint, green tea, aloe vera and chive. They smell like wet, sunny mornings and are also salty, stoney, and in general, hugely euphemistic of those mineral chords that we have trouble agreeing upon how to describe. I was constantly reminded of the childhood aroma of peeling the young bark off of little sticks with a knife (I began to call this note "twiggy” for shorthand), and a colleague very aptly described a recurring “earthiness” as something akin to the aromas that one would find riverside on a cool spring day. The best wines have such astounding, breathtaking clarity that one could take effortless inventory of these qualities in a relaxed and unhurried way, and the terroir-transparency of 2021 is often striking. In general, these are wines that encompass the beauty of early mornings.
In terms of how the wines feel, I would ask you to separate the concepts of weight and solidity. The 2021s aren't full-bodied wines for their respective categories, but they distribute an inordinate volume of flavour over a modest framework. Tasting them is like watching an impossible number of passengers clamber out of a tiny vehicle. They are sinewy, electric and often very intense, and they offer density without richness. On paper, the acidity levels are somewhat high, but balance seemed easy to achieve for the thoughtful winegrower thanks to the high extracts (or perhaps stealthy deacidification in some cases?), but not because of elevated levels of alcohol or egregious residual sugar. The length of the average 2021 seems almost interminable. One couldn't rush the tasting of a lineup, lest one wine would segue directly into the next.
If most wines have structure, then a good 2021 Riesling has architecture. One of the talented colleagues with whom I was travelling tends to think of wine in terms of shape and movement, and though we might have different ways of describing this beautiful property of the vintage, we were both dazzled by the ornateness of construction that we found. These splendorous shapes strike the palate as being delightfully crunchy, some even shattering into detonations of flavour as they play out on the palate. I encountered these virtues in all the major Riesling regions, up and down the quality hierarchy, and across the spectrum of styles.
The 2021 introductory wines are freakish overperformers and we’re about to be spoiled with buzzing, kinetic Rieslings of boundless complexity that refresh as they stupefy. Despite the fact that they are hardly "casual”, emptying a bottle will take no effort at all, and there wasn't a single Riesling grower whose estate Riesling(s) didn't cause me to pause and think, “This is the starting point?!?”. Even our Litre range will offer outrageous intricacy, and in general there's no end of glass pour and guzzle-potential, especially for the cerebrally-inclined. Will all this be too much for the casual consumer? I doubt it—the wines are delicious and those who don't want to probe the mysteries therein can simply relish in how fervently “yum yum” they are.
Restricting ourselves to dry wines for the time being, I feel that the impatient amongst you might be slightly confused by the 2021 Grand Crus (GGs for the VDP members, and top dry Rieslings for the rest). The lavish textures and abundant fruitiness that some of the '18, '19 and '20s boasted are mostly missing here, and despite their soaring, irresistible aromatics, the palates of these '21s are sometimes an austere cacophony of acidity and dry extract at this point. There are one or two exceptions (Wagner-Stempel's Höllberg GG comes to mind), but even if there weren't, I would still believe in this category for 2021, at least among the growers with whom we work. The best will be lucid, distinguished expressions of their respective terroirs, and though I don't necessarily think that they'll outlast their counterparts from warmer vintages, they just seem to need a bit longer to get into the zone.
All of the introductory dry Rieslings that we work with enjoy commercial success because, coming from great producers, they offer excellent value, eminent utility and the potential for restaurants to offer them by the glass. More surprisingly, the GGs and equivalents also sell well despite sharing precisely none of these virtues. One needs to consider that, at least in the case of the VDP's GGs, much importance is placed upon capacities of Riesling that simply do not matter. Among these fatuous values I would single out power, richness and opulence, all aspects that aren't the least bit unique to German Riesling, nor to Riesling at all. In fact, if anything, they compromise the singularity of Riesling from Germany, though I sympathize with the fact that people want what they've been made to understand is “the best”, even if their understanding of this is unfounded. To be fair, when Metrovino offers the top dry wines, it's because we believe that they are worthwhile, and anybody who's purchased GGs and equivalents from us in the past will have reasons to celebrate once those wines reach 8 to 10 years of age—though it helps to be in the mood for a “significant” wine.
Somewhere in between the estate wines and the GGs resides a category (technically two, at least in some chapters of the VDP) that partially shares the virtues of value and accessibility with the former selections, and the complexity and terroir-transparency of the latter. Whether these are ortsweine (village wines) or erste lagen (premiers crus) matters not, but I can speak from experience that virtually nobody in Alberta gives a fuck about these very useful and delicious categories… and people definitely should give a fuck about them, particularly regarding 2021 when their grand cru counterparts need more time.
From the slightly less revered vineyards, and sometimes from a blend of them, we can find dynamic dry wines of levity⁴, enjoyability and site-specificity that are virtually impossible to emulate elsewhere. There's Fricke's etched village wines from Lorch and Kiedrich, Leitz's Rüdesheimer postcard known as Magic Mountain, Spreitzer's affable Muschelkalk, Dönnhoff's spritely Tonschiefer and spicy Höllenpfad, Schätzel's fluorescent Niersteiner, Wagner-Stempel's show-stopping Porphyr (every cellar should have at least 6 bottles) and AJ Adam's frisky Dhroner, just to name a few.
⁴I’m fond of this word, coming from the Latin levis for “light”, but must acknowledge that I’m borrowing it from David Schildknecht who has it in regular rotation.
Alexandra Künstler of Weiser Künstler in the Ellergrub vineyard.
Many of the most enticing 2021 Rieslings utilize residual sugar. Please don't take this to mean that the dry wines aren't worth buying this year, because that's certainly not true. But the heights that some of the fruity wines reach are fundamentally incredible, and sometimes these minor miracles transpired at unsuspecting addresses. A year ago I told you that the 2020 vintage provided us with some very exciting kabinette that were more honest representations of the style than what we'd become used to. That was true, but the 2021s are of a completely different order.
In a way, it seems like all the fruity wines took a step down in the prädikat “hierarchy”, meaning that the auslesen feel like modern-day spätlesen, and the spätlesen feel like what we've erroneously come to regard as “kabinett". This might seem like poor value, given that 2021 has corrected the “supersizing” of everything, except for two things. One is that somewhere along the way, we'd lost sight of the most singular and inimitable German winestyle of all, namely true, light, barely sweet and exhilarating kabinett. I don't care if my kabinett purchases were actually being upgraded to spätlese when I didn't want a big juicy sweet wine in the first place—I want a featherweight marvel that I can drink all day! 2021 has made this style possible again, and to a much greater and more brilliant extent than 2020. Second, what each prädikat has lost this year in terms of weight and richness (again, dubious Riesling virtues at best), they've more than made up for in terms of vibrancy and sheer intensity of flavour. That's a worthwhile trade-off in my opinion.
We encountered magisterial kabinette at Adam, Weiser-Künstler, Falkenstein, Scharzhof, Dönnhoff and Schätzel. Far less expected was the fearsome quality of crunchy, lithe and perfectly poised kabinette at Spreitzer, Wagner-Stempel and Darting. Some of these represent my most beloved wines of the 2021 vintage, and the potential euphony between residual sugar, dry extract and riveting acidity seemed to be at its apogee in this category. If you're one of those people who remain averse to any discernible sweetness in wine and thereby aren't open to the very idea of these singular beauties, I commiserate with whatever it is that's wrong with your mouth, and I pity you for what you'll be missing out on.
That being said, there was more than one tasting during which I was blown away by exhilarating kabinette, only to be underwhelmed by the corresponding spätlesen. I began to wonder if this was due to an incapacity to look past a subjective stylistic preference, but I suspect not. Spätlesen are rare in 2021, and I feel that at certain addresses, the sweet-spot of the harvest (no pun intended) was in the brilliant kabinett category—for reasons of complexity and soul-stirability in addition to utility. But we'll be proudly offering 2021 spätlesen that provide a step up in complexity and profundity, not just weight or sweetness. Spreitzer's 303 is its usual riotous self and Dönnhoff's Brücke is a contender for the wine of the vintage, but the real mindfucker came at Wagner-Stempel. Daniel Wagner generally gives little thought to fruity wines, but we were shown a spätlese from Heerkretz that seemed to sizzle the very ground we stood upon, and I can't wait to share it with you.
Most of the botrytis of 2021 was unhealthy, and talented growers eradicated it from the vineyards in the midst of the growing season. This, allied with the lack of warmth, meant that there are barely any wines of auslese ripeness and above, but some of those that exist are clean and precise to the extent that they almost taste like miniature eisweine. We'll be offering a "drinky” masterpiece from Adam, as well as a spectral dream from Wei-Kü. Speaking of eiswein, both Adam and Dönnhoff made brilliant examples from Hofberg and Brücke respectively, and I'm presently trying to decide whether or not I should tie up Metrovino's money in the support of these miracles of nature. I think I probably will, because I can’t stand the thought of placing commercial rationality before the celebration of beauty.
Lastly, there's the tricky category of Riesling that isn’t quite dry, but also isn't explicitly sweet. In other words, and in successful examples, wines in which the grower has allowed for a discreet amount of residual sugar that engenders a beautiful and inherent sense of balance as opposed to discernible sweetness. Something that isn't unique to 2021 is that this “feinherb” category, tiny as it may be, represents many of the greatest successes of the year. First and foremost, and once again, Adam's in der Sengerei is an indisputable masterpiece—not that its downhill neighbor, im Pfarrgarten, is anything to shake a stick at! Spreitzer's Jesuitengarten is a Rheingau legend, Fricke's Seligmacher is decidedly supernal and any number of the barely off-dry wines at Falkenstein are kinetic, electric reasons for rejoice. On the more casual front, Wei-Kü, Darting and Leitz made affordable, adorable feinherb wines for intemperate mid-day glugging. I praise this category every year, but in 2021, a tangible core of flavour allied with breathtaking clarity and vibrancy make the best of these utterly irresistible.
Before closing, I must comment on the prices. With few exceptions, good German Riesling is one of the most underpriced categories on the planet. We work with inordinately talented winegrowers, many of whom farm predominantly steep slopes, and many of whom work entirely by hand. Several of these estates are recently established, and some haven't been out of the zone of financial precariousness for long. Prices have been justifiably creeping up here and there, but with 2021 we have a vintage in which everybody had to work much harder than usual to produce much less wine than usual. All this is augmented by the fact that there's been an explosion in the cost of, well, everything. You've seen it yourself, and it's not just gasoline, celery and vinyl records that have gotten more expensive—it's also bottles, labels, corks, cardboard boxes, water, fuel, beer and literally everything else that goes into making wine. Every single German producer that we work with has increased their prices this year, some by a little, and some by a lot. I have visited all of them. I've seen their facilities, ridden in their vehicles and eaten in their homes, and I can assure you that none of them are getting rich off of us! I support their desire to be fairly compensated for the work that they’re doing, and I ask you to please be ready to pay slightly more than last year to enjoy their incredible wines.
Taking a break with Andreas Adam in Goldtröpfchen.
I've found that what I personally seek in German Riesling, the greatest beverage of all, isn't always congruent with what's celebrated by other partisans of the category, not to mention the prevailing opinions of the general consumer. Additionally, the fact that German Riesling can be great in so many different ways makes it increasingly difficult to quantify the myriad and divergent virtues of any given vintage. I won't argue that 2021 is the greatest vintage of the last decade, but I can say that it makes me very happy and that it's likely destined to become my favourite. If what you love about Riesling from Germany is its singular capacity to produce light, vivid, refreshing wines of great intensity across a spectrum of sweetness levels, the best of 2021 will make you very happy as well.
