In spring fever for Mosel Riesling, wine critic Eric Asimov of the The New York Times and a tasting panel judged 20 Kabinett wines from the 2008 vintage. Their top choice was from A.J. Adam. As good as the Hofberg Riesling Kabinett is—and we do like the wines from Andreas Adam, too—what has been lost in the article and corresponding blog post is a broader explanation of the term Kabinett. It’s usually been assumed by many German wine lovers, especially in the States, to be (when well made, of course) a delicate sweet wine with a wonderful balance between fruit and acidity, almost coming off as drier than it really is, especially in certain vintages with sufficient acidity and some bottle age. Yet, this is only one of the styles of Kabinett, there are also Kabinett trocken (dry) and halbtrocken/feinherb (off-dry) that deserve more recognition abroad and can be just as fine and delicate as their sweeter counterparts, even if the trend among producers nowadays is to downgrade their Spätlese trocken as Kabinett trocken or to entirely rename their dry-tasting Rieslings without a Prädikat designation.

Besides top famous estates such as Joh. Jos. Prüm or Schloss Lieser, and ignoring the tasting panel results for a moment, there are a number of other fruity Mosel Riesling Kabinett wines worthy of mention from the ’08 vintage, among them Enkircher Ellergrub from Weiser-Künstler, Ürziger Würzgarten from Jos. Christoffel jr., and Scharzhofberger from Egon Müller, who has various bottlings of Kabinett, even though some critics feel the real quality starts at Spätlese for this renowned Saar estate. It’s also worth noting that all the above producers specialize in sweeter-style Riesling.

Earlier this month at a dinner, Carl von Schubert, owner of the prestigious Maximin Grünhaus in the Ruwer Valley, explained that residual sugar levels for Riesling Kabinett have increased significantly over the last three decades from about 20 to 30 grams per liter residual sugar (equivalent to today’s Riesling Kabinett feinherb) to well over 60 or more. Put differently, sweetness (not just ripeness) levels have risen, often impressing certain critics and drinkers alike. He was only referring to the so-called “classic” fruity-sweet Kabinett—when the wine-maker purposely stops the fermentation, usually by temperature control and sulfur, to leave a certain level of sugar in the finished wine. Von Schubert has always made, alongside his sweet wines, traditional light-bodied dry and off-dry Rieslings (including Kabinett), which happen to represent the majority of his production, similar to Stein in our portfolio. For example, Ulli Stein likes to make from his 100-year-old vines in St. Aldegunder Himmelreich both Riesling Kabinett trocken and feinherb bottlings. The grapes from these old ungrafted vines in this stony, east-facing plot fully ripen at lower must weights than clones do and are ideal for Kabinett. He neither makes a fruity-sweet Kabinett nor a dry Spätlese from this site, rather a true dry Mosel Kabinett as he sees it.

Before the 1971 German Wine Law was enacted, unchaptalized wines were simply labeled naturrein (“naturally pure”). These were often fermented until they stopped on their own towards dry or off-dry. Unlike Spätlese, which would have some discreet sweetness (pre-sterile filter) and was redefined under the 1971 Wine Law, the Prädikat termed “Kabinett” was a new designation altogether and has since become synonymous in export markets, in particular, for delicately sweet, low-alcohol Mosel Riesling à la Joh. Jos. Prüm or Fritz Haag. With 10 years or more bottle age, good examples of this now-classic style come across less sweet and can show wonderful balance. The old term Cabinet, which originated in the Rheingau, had no relation and meant instead a special reserve bottling. For example, in the late eighteenth century Schloss Johannisberg bottled “Cabinet” wines that were nobly sweet.

The 1971 Wine Law and subsequent amendments created today’s Prädikat system by linking specific minimum ripeness levels of the grapes at harvest to different terms: Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenauslese, and Eiswein. Kabinett has the lowest ripeness level (73° Oechsle on the Mosel) and, as mentioned above, can be fermented dry, off-dry, or sweet. In other words, two scales exist: one indicating ripeness of the grapes at harvest, and the other measuring the residual sugar in the finished wine. This was the case from the outset of the ‘71 Wine Law, that is German wine-makers could produce Kabinett trocken and halbtrocken (or feinherb) as well as those with more noticeable residual sugar. In any of its variations, it’s meant to be lighter than a Spätlese from the same producer and vintage, for the grapes were picked earlier. Because there is no maximum Oechsle or alcohol level, most Riesling Kabinette are actually (declassified) Spätlesen or Auslesen in must weight. Producers frequently want to impress journalists this way. In addition, with climate change, some recent vintages have had extreme ripeness levels early on, which results in both higher must weights and sweetness levels. So much depends on the yields, the time of picking, and the physiological ripeness of the grapes. Furthermore, the trend at the moment, especially among the elite winegrowers’ association, called the VDP, is to phase out the terms trocken and halbtrocken for Riesling Kabinett, Spätlese, and the seldomly used Auslese (trocken) in favor of a Gutswein/Gutsriesling (Estate wine), an Ortswein (village wine), and a Grosses Gewächs (grand cru), somewhat following the system in Burgundy. Although much of the VDP’s reasoning makes sense (disregarding the elitist tendencies), it brings with it all sorts of other complications.

Lastly, some critics have argued that dry Mosel Rieslings, especially Kabinett, taste shrill and the only good examples have sweetness. An importer even wrote that Germans like to drink Sprüdel (sparkling water), hence their proclivity for dry, insipid wines. It’s similar to those that say great dry German Riesling only comes from Rheinhessen or Pfalz, but not from the Mosel. As with sweet wines, there are certainly plenty of poorly made dry Mosel Riesling, whether tart, bitter, or clumsy. In regard to preferences, many locals favor the sweeter styles, especially Kabinett, but the French also lean more towards drinking dry wines, an experience we know firsthand from our portfolio tasting events in Paris over the last several years. And the best dry wines from the Mosel measure up against any region in Germany and beyond.

New Steinmetz retro label will adorn bottles beginning with the 2009 vintage.

In late December, I was invited to an impressive back-vintage tasting of diverse Mosel Riesling at Weingut Günther Steinmetz in Brauneberg. Because I foolishly discarded my scribbled notes, I cannot recall all the fine details of the event, but here’s what I did remember:

After all the bottles had been carefully uncorked and lined up, we began with two 1971s, a highly sought-after vintage (and my birth year!), and worked back through the decades to a 1921 Piesporter. Several of the wines, including a 1971 Graacher Himmelreich (Bergweiler-Prüm), 1952 Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr (Ferdinand Haag), and several Wehlener (1940 Lay, 1938 Rosenberg, and 1937), were sourced from a cellar in Mülheim. The Steinmetzes had vintages from the early sixties and late fifties on hand. And Gernot Kollmann, who now runs Immich-Batterieberg, had brought six different vintages directly from the estate’s cellar in Enkirch.

The 1971 Graacher was oxidized, but the ’71 Enkircher Ellergrub from Immich was in fine form with surprisingly bright acidity. We followed these two with a 1967 Eitelsbacher Karthäuserhofberger Sang Spätlese, which was unfortunately showing oxidation as well. In the 1960s Weingut Karthäuserhof had some remarkable bottlings known for their warmth and generosity, not the terms most often associated with the estate’s wines today, but sadly we couldn’t get a good look at the wine through the oxidation here. (For a period of time up until the mid 1980s, Karthäuserhof had bottled their wines from the iron-rich Karthäuserhofberg according to five former place-names: Burgberg, Kronenberg, Orthsberg, Sang, and Stirn.)

Although there was an occasional off-putting bottle or wines simply past their prime, the tasting revealed some real gems. Stefan Steinmetz’s father, Günther, who joined us for the occasion, made his first wine as a 17-year-old in 1958.  And we were fortunate to taste a bottle from this vintage: a 1958 Brauneberger Mandelgraben naturrein from Willi Steinmetz. (On old labels naturrein means literally “naturally pure,”  and was the pre-1971 Wine Law term for a non-chaptalized wine before today’s Prädikat system, which had created Kabinett to go along with Spätlese, Auslese, and so forth. Willi Steinmetz was the former name of Weingut Günther Steinmetz.). In those early years, until the sterile filter became readily available to more small winegrowers, he produced mostly dry Riesling. In addition to the ’58 Mandelgraben, we were treated to his ’59 Brauneberger Hasenläufer Auslese and a ’60 Brauneberger Juffer naturrein. All three were still exquisite and vibrant. One of my favorites was the 1960 Juffer, which had less than 2 grams per liter residual sugar.  It was an absolutely stunning bottle of Mosel Riesling, especially from a “lesser” vintage.

Among the other highlights was a ’64 Enkircher Batterieberg Auslese from Immich-Batterieberg. As with the 1953 Ellergrub (naturrein), both had been recorked at the domaine, which surely made them taste differently and younger than had they not been recorked. On the other hand, the oldest vintages—1949 and 1938 Batterieberg—still had original corks and were strikingly youthful, an incredible sign of just how long Mosel Riesling can age.

Ulli standing in front of a barrel of 2008 Palmberg trocken. Photograph by Tobias Hannemann.

In the 2008 vintage, for the first time in several years, Ulli Stein made a legally dry, rather than off-dry, Spätlese from his 40- to 100-year-old vines in Palmberg-Terrassen. Harvested on November 7 and 8, the Steins put the ripe, non-destemmed grape bunches into a crusher followed by a cool 16-hour pre-fermentation maceration. After a gentle pneumatic pressing followed by natural sedimentation in tank, the juice went into two old barrels, where fermentation started spontaneously. The wines were left on their gross lees in Fuder until bottling. For those looking for an analysis, 2008 St. Aldegunder Palmberg-Terrassen Spätlese trocken has 96° Oechsle,  12.1% alcohol by volume, 8.6 grams per liter acidity, and 8 grams per liter residual sugar.

Ulli Stein would be the first to admit that vineyards such as the imposing Winninger Uhlen or the renowned Wehlener Sonnenuhr are historically nobler in rank than the unsung St. Aldegunder Palmberg-Terrassen. Notwithstanding, he has shown over the years that his beloved Palmberg makes for more expressive wines than many famous sites along the Mosel. Even some more highly touted sites that Ulli works are not without their complications. For instance, the neighboring Bremmer Calmont, the steepest vineyard in Europe, suffers now from a lack of water in hot years—because of climate change, so do many top vineyards—but this remains a relative non-issue for the sheltered, less drought-prone Palmberg-Terrassen. With sufficient water at the top of the slope, Palmberg’s grapes tend to be more vigorous and can hang longer on the vines, so that, even with comparable Oechsle levels, the grapes and resulting wines from Palmberg normally have 2 g/l acidity more than those from Calmont. (In 2008, Ulli decided against bottling his dry Riesling from Calmont as Spätlese even though the grapes were ripe enough to qualify, because he felt the wine lacked the necessary definition and quality for this Prädikat. Unlike the VDP-labeling trend towards Grosses Gewächs and away from the use of Prädikat designations for dry Riesling, Ulli continues to label his top dry wines as “Spätlese trocken.” This, of course, is a topic for another post.)

When traveling down the Lower Mosel to Koblenz, even before reaching the grand single vineyards (Uhlen, Hamm, and Röttgen) of Winningen, many sites seem more striking than Palmberg-Terrassen. Yet once in the idyllic, steep-terraced Palmberg, it becomes apparent how special this site really is. (“Palm” is patois for Buchsbaum, boxwood, a shrub prevalent around the Mediterranean that also grows on this hillside.) Besides the 35- to 90-year-old vines rooted deep in weathered blue and gray slate, this side-valley vineyard is protected from the north and east winds, and, as mentioned earlier, has adequate water from a spring situated above, which supplies even in dry years the greater part of the vineyard with enough water.

After the Second World War, when others ignored its promise, Ulli’s father re-cultivated what had become largely wild terrain. He pruned old vines, planted new ones, repaired drywall terraces, cleared small sections and planted anew, put in fresh wooden stakes, and removed hedges. Over the decades he and Ulli have treated it as a kind of vineyard-garden hybird (at his house, Ulli’s 87-year-old dad has a truly amazing garden), and even now it reflects a gardener’s exacting, loving attention to detail and beauty. In fact, Ulli’s dad has a mini-terraced shrine within Palmberg and, behind a shed nearby, a secret hiding place in the ground to keep bottles of Palmberg readily chilled for drinking. He still consumes a bottle a day at his ripe old age.

Of course, there are so many other unheralded vineyards, jutting up from the Mosel or running along side valleys, including some in the nearby village of Zell, a source we think of only for cheap brand wines like Zeller Schwarze Katz. Zell’s “problem” is that it has lacked a great winemaker to match the potential greatness of its vineyards, the same for the area around Burg, where both the hillside setting and the bridge-crossing further downstream is reminiscent of Wehlen. Who knows this section of the Mosel? Or better yet: which winemaker will have the ambition (and the capital) to attempt to make something special from these sites? Wolfer Goldgrube is as impressive as many an oxbow on the Mosel, and only has regained some of its former acclaim in the last several years because of Daniel Vollenweider’s intensive efforts to rejuvenate both its vines and its reputation. How many so-called Mosel wine experts recognize the name Trarbacher Hühnerberg, now farmed primarily by the traditionalist Martin Müllen? It’s located along the Kautenbach, one of the many tributaries (Saar, Olewiger Bach, Ruwer, and Dhron among others) running through the Hunsrück, and was also a highly-ranked vineyard in the nineteenth century.

All this speaks to the difficulty of trying to classify vineyards. Palmberg-Terrassen, despite being modestly tucked behind the village of St. Aldegund, is in its best sections an ideal spot to grow Riesling. In addition, almost all the vines, which are trained in the traditional manner on wooden stakes, are ungrafted, on average 70 years old, and well-kept on steep, terraced, stony-slate soils. (Click on this winter photo to get a better idea.)

Many of the famous Middle Mosel sites have been restructured (Flurbereinigung) to make them more economical to work and then replanted (usually wire-trained) with clones. Fortunately, there are winegrowers who seek out old vines in steep, often terraced, vineyards that can only be worked by hand with vines trained on wooden stakes. Clemens Busch continues to reclaim some of the best and steepest sites within Pündericher Marienburg, notably in Rothenpfad and Falkenlay. Florian Lauer (Weingut Peter Lauer) has saved a terraced plot of old vines on the top of a cliff in the forgotten Schonfels, and Andreas Adam (Weingut A.J. Adam) has acquired a well-situated, terraced parcel in Goldtröpfchen. Few winegrowers want to work such sites, because it doesn’t pay. The steepest sections of the well-known Saarburger Rausch, those further west and lower down the slope, lie fallow; it is the higher, flatter area that has been renewed and can be worked more easily by tractor.

Since the 1940s, Ulli’s father and later Ulli have only been replanting non-grafted vines from their own cuttings via sélection massale (mass selection)—the old, traditional method. And they didn’t evaluate the grape quality of those vines merely based on their grapes’ sugar levels or plumpness, but rather they propagated those that fulfilled the following criteria (here the sequence in order of importance):

• Small, loose grape bunches with tiny berries of which 20 to 80 percent include millerandage, i.e., plenty of small, seedless berries, with a high skin-to-juice ratio, and a high concentration of acidity, aroma, and sugar.
• Healthy grapes with no stem disease, no fungus, and little rot, when then “noble rot.”
• Yellow to brown berries, with brown spots like freckles.

The old vines were evaluated over many years, before and during the harvest, and correspondingly tagged. Vines that are tagged 22 to 25 times within 25 years have been used for propagation. “This means that our Riesling vines are our own ‘clones,’ namely selected material with, as much as possible, uniform genetic potential, only we have applied entirely different criteria than by the modern Geisenheimer, Neustädter, and other Riesling clones, which were only selected for yield and fruit ripeness,” explained Ulli.

Even if he acquires new plots with dormant old vines, Ulli only replaces them if they no longer yield fruit or are attacked by disease, such as esca, and he does so one at a time, rather than grubbing up an entire section of old vines.

Looking at Palmberg-Terrassen, with its nooks and crannies among the numerous dry-wall terraces on predominantly blue-gray slate, it becomes apparent how complex researching just one singular site can be. For instance, the original Aldegunder Palmberg—no “St.” or “-Terrassen” (terraces) attached to the name back then—was a smaller site and had different boundaries in the past.

Ulli writes, “amongst other things, the 1971 German Wine Law destroyed both the diversity of single vineyards and their historic individuality, cultivated for centuries. The merging of smaller, individual sites into larger vineyards was supposed to simplifiy things for the ‘consumer.’ Instead, it served the Großkellereien [large bulk producers], which could buy more wine from one (persumably more familiar) expanded site and could use the best site names also for flatland vineyards now legally incorporated under that name. Palmberg-Terrassen was similarly enlarged, but included only steep slate slopes and the damage was not nearly as bad as elsewhere.”

Since 1971, St. Aldegunder Palmberg-Terrassen incorporates three former place-names:

• Palmberg. The western and main part of the steep slope, south facing. (Certain sections, especially the western edge and highest terraces, have been overgrown with shrubs since the 1960s. )
• Hötlay. The impressive terraced knoll, jutting out east of Palmberg, also south facing.
• Rosenberg. An east-facing climat around the bend. (Ulli doesn’t consider this section to be a part of Palmberg-Terrassen. On the panoramic photo, it cannot be seen and almost 95 percent now lies fallow.)

Formerly, the three sites totaled around 20 hectares (49.4 acres), only 4 hectares (!) of which are now planted with vines. Of these 4 hectares, 1 hectare is in the “original” Palmberg and 3 hectares in Hötlay. The Steins have sole ownership (a quasi monopole) of the original Palmberg and own 0.3 hectares and rent another 0.5 hectares in the former Hötlay, meaning that their 1.8 total hectares represent 45% ownership of the post-1971 Palmberg-Terrassen.

The cellar at Weingut Günther Steinmetz. Photograph by Tobias Hannemann.

A 17-year-old Günther Steinmetz made his first vintage in 1958, having taken over from his deceased father. He was one of the few winegrowers to domaine-bottle his wines in the village of Brauneberg in the 1950s. This was before the advent of cultured yeasts, laboratory analysis, and sterile filters (the latter not readily available to most winegrowers at the time and paramount for making the sweet, so-called “classic style” many Mosel Riesling fans love).

His 1958 Brauneberger Hasenläufer Riesling naturrein was fermented and matured naturally dry in Fuder, the traditional 1,000-liter barrels of the Mosel. Back in those days many of the old-vaulted cellars had chimneys to keep temperatures from dipping too low. The wild yeasts didn’t start or keep going if it were too cold. The fear among producers was re-fermentation in bottle, hence wines were usually fermented dry. Bottling occurred around May, and the wines tended to be circa 10-11% in alcohol. Today, Günther’s son, Stefan, bottles from this same plot of vines under the designation Brauneberger Juffer Riesling Devon. (Devon is named after the type of slate soils found along the Mosel from the Devonian Period.)

The German term naturrein meant the wine was non-chaptalized, or not “improved” by adding sugar to increase the alcohol and lower the acidity; Spätlese (late harvest) had little to do with today’s style, merely the time of harvesting. Hasenläufer (Hare Runner) was an old place-name, at the foot of the Brauneberger hillside, below the monopole Kammer higher up. As with many hillside vineyards, it lies on the other side of the Mosel from the village it’s named after. (On old maps Brauneberg was formerly called Dusemond.)

The 1971 German Wine Law rationalized many of these former place-names by grouping them together into legally defined single vineyards. For example, what is today Brauneberger Juffer consisted of several different sites, such as Hasenläufer and Falkenberg among others. Except for Kammer and Juffer-Sonnenuhr, the names have all but disappeared and became part of the enlarged Juffer, which itself was once only a particular site on the famed Braueberger hillside. The same occurred throughout the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer. A couple of our winegrowers, such as Clemens Busch or Florian Lauer, still use (illegally) some original pre-1971 site names to differentiate among wines and their specific nuances.