By Al Drinkle

One of the most exciting things about tasting through any wine region is hearing about different grower’s tactics to overcome challenges and usher beautiful wines into being. Despite the potentially enormous variation of strategies voiced, each proffered as if any other pursuit would result in abject failure, one can taste countless collections of compelling and delicious wines. However, nobody else that I know who's achieving such high levels of quality with Riesling is doing so through such idiosyncratic methods as Kai Schätzel.

I first visited Schätzel in Rheinhessen’s “Roter Hang” in April of 2019. That they had holdings in most of the great Nierstein vineyards was compelling, as was the fact that they devoted a significant portion of their production to Kabinett. Kai was already farming in a highly unorthodox manner at this time. The particulars are best relegated to a another piece of writing, but without going into great detail, he believes that almost all German winegrowers (including the family estate that he took over in 2007) are needlessly farming as if achieving ripeness is the great struggle that it was prior to climate change. The crux of his own philosophy, which utilizes biodynamic and regenerative farming, is that the classically celebrated Riesling vineyards of Germany (ie. the warmest sites where grapes would reliably ripen) can only continue to be the “Grand Crus” in this era of climate change if one were to farm in such a way that physiological ripeness is achieved without the rapid accumulation of sugar. No easy task, but he's unquestionably succeeding in it through the innovative use of cover crops, trellising, vine-spacing, clonal selection, animal husbandry and many other practices beyond my present understanding. It's worth noting that I've visited other producers who have the same goal as Kai, but who attempt to achieve it by merely harvesting early, and their wines usually suck.

As this process was evolving, Weingut Schätzel became synonymous with light, intense, barely alcoholic and barely sweet Kabinett. The category was a perfect byproduct for his viticultural experiments, and a great platform to demonstrate that grapes which had hardly accumulated enough sugar to legally qualify for prädikatswein could render some of the most resplendently flavourful wines on the planet — to say nothing of their enviable cellaring potential. Despite Kai's annual threats to eliminate this category from his collection (in order to devote more fruit to the projects discussed in the coming paragraphs), Schätzel's Kabinette continue to be some of the most exciting wines in Germany, and an offer of the 2022s can be expected in the coming months.

In the meantime, a parallel obsession was arising at Schätzel; one that began to exist symbiotically with the goals of Kai's farming. He had become convinced that, in no small part due to Nierstein’s red slate soils and following routine malolactic fermentation, a natural stability could be achieved in his wines, and that sulfur dioxide — the ubiquitous preservative of winemakers everywhere for countless generations — could be eschewed. This may sound like a pursuit of “natural wine", and Kai would concede that it is, even if only by coincidence, but he and I differ on this. The fact that you're even seeing this offer should support my assurance that I absolutely believe in what he is doing, but I personally feel that the term “natural wine" has been sufficiently debased by an international legion of talentless producers and their fatuous partisans, whereas Kai altruistically wishes to make positive contributions to the movement in hopes that someday it might be taken more seriously by cynics like me. Our disagreement is a matter of semantics and ideological allegiances, nothing more. The point is, at the time of my first visit there were already wines being made without SO2, usually being bottled unfined and unfiltered as well. They have always been free of the usual roster of “faults” that wines without added SO2 can suffer from, and are certainly the most stable unsulfured wines that I had ever encountered.

As a sidenote, this was also part of a phase during which Schätzel wines were extremely reductive, and Kai reports that this was part of his learning curve in the curtailment of sulfur use. In a way it was a success, in that such vehemently reductive wines could be bottled with lower levels of sulfur, but the unfortunate upshot was a range of bottlings that required days of decanting or years in the bottle before people sensitive to intense reduction (ie. most people) could drink them with enjoyment. Happily, this technique has been abandoned, but I purposefully overbought a couple cuvées from 2018 in order to re-release them as enchanting mature wines once the reduction subsides.

Far more exciting to me than the early natural releases was a vertical of Pettenthal GG that I tasted on my second visit to Schätzel in September of 2021. Kai had been bottling and marketing a Pettenthal GG on an annual basis, but the vertical I tasted was still in stückfaße (the ovular 1200L oak barrels that are traditional in regions along the Rhein) resting in his 13th Century cellar. Each year since 2016, he held back a barrel of this top dry wine, none of which had ever been sulfured, racked, fined, filtered or manipulated in any way whatsoever. Not only are these wines exhilarating, they also taste “conventional” in the best sense of the word. Their purity, clarity and complexity belie the fact that over respective autumns, an exceptionally talented farmer had filled ancient barrels with Grand Cru grape juice, and left them to their own devices. It's worth mentioning that most 2016 Riesling GGs (not to mention '17s and '18s!) bottled by producers from all over Germany are starting to demonstrate modest secondary and even lovely tertiary qualities — in other words, they're beginning to be accommodating and enjoyable in a way that most young GGs simply are not. However, Schätzel's “neglected” Pettenthal barrels, despite having never been protected with SO2, are tight, piercing, and showing virtually no signs of development. This is uncanny! What were those barrels topped up with? I wondered, 7500 kms away from Nierstein. This would be answered when another layer of the mystery was revealed to me in May of 2023.

I've now personally tasted from each of Schätzel’s Pettenthal barrels on three separate occasions, and who the fuck am I? Over the years, countless samples must have been drawn from them, which begs the question as to what they've been topped up with. It can't be the same wine, for where would that come from? Perhaps it's the latest vintage of Pettenthal GG, although after the passing of years (not months!), wouldn't this begin to have its influence on the wine? Surely it's not a lesser wine, for how could that be respectful to Schätzel's grandest Grand Cru? After all, one hopes that Mugnier's Musigny barrels aren't topped up with village Chambolle. The astounding answer is that Schätzel’s barrels aren't topped up at all… Somewhere along the way, Kai noticed that a few of his wines were playing host to a thin veil of yeast on their surfaces while still in barrel. Instead of working against this, he began experimenting and visited the Jura to learn more. Today, this layer of saccharomyces yeast is encouraged on all of his barrels of dry wines.

Whether it's flor in the case of sherry, or voile in the Jura's vins jaunes, the biological phenomenon of saccharomyces yeast forming a veil on the surface of unbottled wine is often erroneously cited as being responsible for “oxidative” qualities. This, of course, is a misnomer because such wines are quite the opposite of oxidative — in fact, that layer of yeast is ravenous for oxygen and will eat up any that exists in a barrel that's not quite full, protecting the wine from oxidation in the process. The reason that Kai doesn't have to top up his barrels is that the wines are protected by flor on their surfaces and really healthy gross lees at the bottom of the barrels, together creating an inordinately stable environment. He's even had spigots installed low down on his stückfaße so that drawing a sample doesn't disturb the flor the way that it would if one were to insert a wine thief into the bunghole at the top of the barrel.

Of crucial importance is that the saccharomyces yeast that forms benignly on Schätzel's Rieslings is different from that which is found in Jerez, which in turn is different from what one finds in the Jura. Kai has had his cellar’s yeast analyzed, and as far as anybody can tell him, it's unique. Furthermore, and saliently for those of us who want our German Rieslings to taste somewhat “Riesling-like” and not akin to manzanilla, the Schätzel flor doesn't seem to impart its own overriding character, its utility being anti-oxidative as opposed to flavour-informing. Those of you who have tasted a dry Schätzel Riesling from the past few vintages have already experienced such a wine, probably without even knowing it. (In addition to consuming oxygen, flor consumes unfermented sugar, and therefore it's incongruous with Schätzel's kabinette).

In summary up to this point, Schätzel's radical farming techniques result in wines that achieve physiological ripeness in tandem with unusually modest levels of sugar and wildly low pHs. This coupled with the facts that each barrel destined for dryness undergoes malolactic conversion, is encouraged to develop a layer of “Schätzel flor” and is left on its gross lees for an extended period of time results in wines that are exceedingly stable, and according to Kai, do not require the addition of sulfur dioxide. Considering that much of this potential is due to Nierstein’s special red slate, one could argue that in addition to whatever complex ways the soils inform the nature of the wine, Schätzel’s “terroir” is essential to the very possibility of the wines being made as they are.

Near the end of 2022, Weingut Schätzel released their 2020 bottlings of Hipping and Pettenthal GGs. Prior to this, samples were submitted to the German government to receive an AP number, which any German wine above the lowly “Landwein” quality level requires. No problems here, for why would there be? Next, samples were provided to the VDP, and the wines were assessed by a tasting panel and approved for "GG” status. In April of 2023, a tiny allocation of 2020 Hipping Riesling GG arrived at Metrovino. I opened a bottle, and my colleagues and I enjoyed it immensely but academically (ie. we didn't chug it) over three days. It was excellent in the profound, glacial way that Schätzel's GGs tend to be. It wasn't until I arrived in Nierstein the following month that I found out that this, along with the Pettenthal GG, were made and bottled without any sulfur additions! Kai didn't want this decision to influence the VDP tasting panel, and thus hadn't made a lot of noise about it. So he'd made two brilliant Rieslings and snuck them past the German government, the VDP and the Metrovino crew without anybody noticing that a significant winemaking step had been skipped — namely, the addition of sulfur. The Pettenthal is available below.

Once again tasting through the unbottled Pettenthal vertical with a colleague last May, I asked Kai what he planned to do with these wines. He said that he’d probably bottle them someday, labelling them as “GG Reserve” or whatever if they were accepted by the government and the VDP, or he'd sell them for the same high price with a fantasy name if they weren't. I pointed out that it's become common in Champagne to pursue an expression of terroir through multi-vintage blends, and that seeing as he actually has flor in his cellar, he could even do this as a solera like they do in Jerez. He smiled and beckoned us to the corner of the cellar. “I've been working on this since 2017,” he said as he shared a sample of wine from a 5000L barrel. It was a village-level Nierstein blend — that is, a blend of vineyards and vintages, ranging from 2017 to 2022. There was a healthy layer of flor thriving in the barrel, and of course the wine had never been sulfured. The first ever bottling of this wine is also on offer below.

I love all of our Riesling growers for different reasons, but it's clear that Kai Schätzel is taking the wildest approach, and is perhaps the most delightfully and benignly insane. I'm tempted to say that he’s the most “experimental", but the phase of experimentation seems to have settled into a perhaps permanent ethos of confident eccentricity — although the idea of “permanence" at Schätzel is unlikely. Regardless, it's with great pleasure that I offer you this exceptional collection of singular wines, the culmination of many years of hard work and thoughtful experimentation towards a determined vision.

Several of these wines are available in extremely limited quantities. Please contact us if you're interested in purchasing any of them.

2021 Schätzel Riesling Trocken $39
Bottled with SO2
Kai once told me that this wine makes no sense given that the majority of his holdings are in Grand Cru vineyards, and that it’s primarily to appease the VDP-imposed necessity to have an “estate” wine. Thus, this Riesling (like its Kabinett counterpart) is ridiculously complex and animated, loaded with 2021-style mid-palate intensity and stringing interminable salt crystals along interminable spiderwebs. The fruit hasn’t yet emerged (although it erupts for the unwashed wine glass the next morning!), but delicate floral tones linger amidst the chorus of minerality. Simultaneously thought-provoking and chuggable, this will age beautifully and we’d all still pay attention if this were Schätzel’s top wine instead of their introductory Riesling. It goes without saying that this offers mind-boggling value.

2021 Steiner Silvaner $52
No added sulfur
Silvaner is the historical grape of Nierstein, depending on the point in history being referenced. Schätzel’s Silvaners are a touch creamier than their Rieslings, but also more marine in flavour. It’s another contender for what Chablis partisans are describing when they go on about the saline, stoney, oyster shell thing, reminding me also of an inordinately textured Côte de Blancs vin clair. Recognizing that I’ve never made an attempt to pump Silvaner, let me take this opportunity to say that this one is absolutely worthy of your attention.

Steiner Riesling “17-22” $52
No added sulfur
This is the inaugural release of Schätzel’s Niersteiner flor-protected Riesling solera, encompassing vintages 2017 to 2022. Each individual vintage was fermented in its own 1200L stückfaß, and then combined in a very seasoned 5000L barrel, a portion of which was bottled in the summer of 2022 under DIAM10 closures. In addition to eschewing sulfur, it’s immediately evident that the wine was not fined or filtered. So if this was a sherry, which it very much is not, you could think of it as an en rama bottling in that the wine is exactly as it would be were a sample drawn from the gigantic barrel for you (although it has picked up some reduction by being imprisoned in glass).

As far as I know, there’s no Riesling parallel for this wine, nor can I think of a fitting reference in the vast wine world. This being the case, I endeavoured to critically drink a small glass every day until the bottle was empty or the wine died… Everything about this being completely new to me (and assumedly anybody else who might approach it), I wanted to try to wrap my mind around it the best I could.

On day one, it’s assertively reductive, very much craving oxygen. There’s also vigorous turbidity, the wine being distinctly cloudy, but not particularly deep in colour. Lurking underneath the reductive stink, there’s qualities that I associate with Schätzel and Nierstein — fervid minerality, vivid northern pitted fruit and white flowers. It’s extremely dry, which lines up with the employment of flor, and amazingly full-bodied for its 10.5% alcohol. Reductivity follows through on the palate, all this making the first day’s tasting more academic than enjoyable.

There weren’t huge differences on the second day, except that I noticed the almost inexplicably long, salty finish. The flavours lingered in an intense way for minutes and minutes, my tongue seemingly saturated in this wild, intense, yeasty elixir. On day three, real vinous aromas and flavours began to emerge as the reduction began to recede. There were still lingering yeasty, cidery esters, and perhaps that’s what made me think of Chenin Blanc as much as Riesling at this point. Though still not yet “delicious”, the wine was beginning to demonstrate considerable intrigue. Spinning a multiplicity of nuances through the creaky rolodex of my brain, it reminded me of a few particular things, none of them Riesling, curiously, although perhaps that was taken for granted.

Firstly, and aromatically, it’s redolent of a Jacques Lassaigne Champagne — a bit cheesy, “bronze” and precise. Speaking of precision, the emerging palate was articulate, chiselled and austere like a Thibaud Boudignon Savennières. Lastly, and strangely, it took me way back to the whites made by Jacques Puffeney of Arbois. Puffeney has been retired for almost a decade and was better known for his reds than whites, but I had a few wonderful experiences with some of his rich, resinous and expansive white wines — which incidentally also sometimes took days to open up.

On the fourth day, this fascinating wine was suddenly cracked open and really delicious. Yellow apple notes paraded by on salt floats and a brazen, verdant herbaceousness emerged from who knows where, as did a compelling beeswax quality towards which the wine hadn’t even hinted towards prior. To be clear, it was still very much in a league of its own, and would remain so throughout the duration of my experiment, so I’m certainly not claiming that by day four the wine tasted recognizably like a typical Nierstein Riesling. However, it had won me over and I could have easily drained the bottle with great pleasure at this point, but I conjured some resilience and persisted with the experiment.

The wine seemed to regress a bit back into vague reduction on the fifth day, but this could easily have had more to do with my curmudgeonly mood than anything else. I loved it again on the sixth and seventh days, but on day eight, having been standing upright in my cellar for a week, the last small glass was deleteriously turbid and the wine tasted anonymously yeasty. Perhaps I should have disturbed the particulates prior to each pour?

In conclusion, this wine, like the way it came to fruition, is quite unlike anything that I’ve ever experienced in my life. It takes patience. I would argue that, based on the carefully considered and absolutely unique way that it's grown and made, not to mention the rewards that come through with enough air, it deserves the patience that it requires. It transcends any existing category, and flirts with beautiful qualities of “conventional” Riesling for freshness and intensity; Chenin for waxiness and its expanse; Champagne (albeit without bubbles) for its pseudo-autolytic qualities; and who knows what else.

It shows best out of a glass that gives it room to breathe, for example, I liked it better from a Zalto Universal than their Weißwein glass. To enjoy it in the evening, I’d recommend throwing it into a decanter before heading to work in the morning to get it into prime shape for dinner. I found that it could be enjoyed slightly colder than cellar temperature once it opened up, but that fridge temperature was too cold at any point of its development.

Based on a combination of many factors, I’m convinced that this wine will age effortlessly, although since I’ve never encountered anything quite like it, I could only guess as to how long it would benignly evolve for, and what trajectory it would take to get to some sort of “peak”.

In short, I’m fascinated — and so should you be — about this singular Riesling that defies category. Thus ends the longest tasting note that I’ve ever written.

2021 Ölberg GG $72
Bottled with SO2
A masterpiece of serenity, and an aromatic dreamscape. It’s 11.5% alcohol, and its svelteness is belied by a crazy intensity of flavour and structure — particularly a mid-palate density of chewy, crystalline white fruit qualities. The wine feels enchanting, and an eternal finish hints at the fortunes to come. It’s more demure than its 2020 counterpart, but I believe that its subtlety is a facade for boundless intricacy. It goes without saying that the next step up is a considerable financial commitment, and given the price and availability, I’m going to say something that I almost never say… namely, buy as much as you can, and you’ll never regret it.

2018 Pettenthal GG $249
Bottled with SO2

2019 Pettenthal GG $249
Bottled with SO2

2020 Pettenthal GG $249
No added sulfur

In April of 2022, Kai treated my fellow travellers and I to a broken vertical of (bottled!) Pettenthal GG from 2019 back to 2009. It was an incredible tasting and further solidified my belief in this extraordinary wine. It somehow has even greater intricacy than his other GGs, and there's a beguiling, caressing textural motif showing up in each vintage. On average it seems to really start pumping at about seven or eight years of age, but most vintages will be enjoyable over the course of a couple decades.

The 2019 titillates the imagination with crystalline salinity and evaporating flowers, though this hardly begins to describe the seemingly psychotropic experience. There’s a lot that’s charming about this vintage in general, and Pettenthal seems to capitalise on this allure without being the least bit facile. It’s an extraordinary vista of charm, with ripe peachy fruit and beguiling sun-warmed minerality leading the charge.

Though the 2018 will require a bit more patience, it seems to have an even greater concentration of salt-spice, diamonds and kaleidoscopic floral tones. I re-tasted this in May of 2023 and it remains stubborn and reductive, but immeasurably intense and breathtakingly precise. Fruit is more or less a non-issue at this point, but really, it’s still early days for what is clearly a fundamentally amazing wine.

The 2020 is again different, and I’m not sure much of that has to do with the forgoing of sulfur. It’s unyieldingly salty, and penetrating in its interplay of chalky and waxy qualities. Consistent with my Pettenthal experience, it’s too early for much of what we might consider primary fruit, but instead there’s an aromatic rainbow of every silver, grey and white shade imaginable, and an unrelenting intensity of flavour. It’s like the wine has installed more taste buds onto your tongue so that you can taste more of it with each sip. I’m tempted to say that perhaps even more so than the wines that I tasted on a revelatory visit to Overnoy/Houillon, this is the most incredible no-added-sulfur wine that I’ve ever encountered in my life.

This is a high price-tag for German Riesling and I hope it doesn't become a trend that each VDP member has their token “expensive-as-fuck" cuvée. But we pay these prices for less-deserving wines from all sorts of other places with relative frequency — usually wines that can be farmed with tractors, and often with less intensity, complexity and capacity to age. It all comes down to two simple facts; namely, Schätzel’s Pettenthal GG is an extraordinary wine, and it costs $249 per bottle.

Schätzel - Mad Scientist Trocken

By Al Drinkle

Eva Hudson