VIEW FROM THE CELLAR - Keller Wein

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estates currently practice in their famous vineyards. How this will shake out in the end will be very interesting to witness, as some of Germany’s most famous vignerons have argued for years that higher yields are desirable to make great classic German Riesling, and their now current practices will be proscribed by the new VDP regulations. For these high yield advocates, they have until 2014 to decide on how to adapt their practices in the vineyards to the new, stricter yield regulations. Below the level of the Erste Lage wines, or Grand Crus, will be wines that are categorized as “Ortsweine”, which will essentially be the quality equivalent of village wines in Burgundy. In fact, the new VDP regulations are very Burgundian-centric in orientation, as the VDP has clearly embraced the concept of terroir with the new regulations and will be promoting terroir at every opportunity. This seems like a highly logical direction for the organization to take and I suspect that it will lead to an even greater visibility for top German wines in the international marketplace. The Ortsweine category will list the wines by the village name, such as Saarburger Kabinett from Weingut Geltz-Zilliken, with no mention of the name of the vineyard to appear on the label, and in fact, these wines can be blended from several of the best vineyards in the village. The maximum yields allowed for wines to be sold in the Ortsweine level is only sixty-five hectoliters per hectare, which is still dramatically below what many estates are practicing for their very best wines. The Ortsweine level can be either dry or off-dry, and terms like Trocken, Feinherb and Kabinett will appear at this level, depending on how the wine is finished off by the winemaker in terms of residual sweetness. At the level below this is the final category, called “Gutsweine”, which is roughly equivalent to the Bourgogne appellation in Burgundy and which will just have the name of the estate producing the wine on the label, along with perhaps Riesling Trocken or a proprietary name, such as Weingut Rheinhold Haart’s “Haart to Heart” bottling. All of these changes should make reading German wine labels to wine lovers relatively new to the wines of the country much easier to decipher, and the limits on maximum yields is going to make a quality revolution in the realm of German wine. Egon Müller has long argued that excessive yields was one of the German wine world’s biggest Achilles’ heels, and clearly we will soon find out if his observations are accurate, as yields are going to be coming down dramatically at some estates in the not too distant future. To date, the only estate that I know has adopted this new classification for their 2009ers is Weingut Geltz-Zilliken, as Hanno Zilliken and his daughter Dorothy Zilliken both observed “that what better vintage could we have than 2009 to start to adopt our viticultural practices to the new regulations- so why wait until 2014?” I should note that one of the other important tenets of the new VDP regulations is that minimum must weights for the Erste Lage category will be Spätlese- even for wines that are to be designated as Kabinett- which may make it more difficult to find those delicate, filigreed Kabinetts of yesteryear. When I mentioned this to a German friend, he quickly pointed out that “climate change has effectively already done away with most Kabinetts at old Kabinett levels of must weight anyway and the new regulations are simply formalizing what Mother Nature has already decreed.”
Rheinhessen Weingut Keller (Dalsheim) It is always a pleasure to visit with Klaus-Peter Keller and his wife Julia at their winery in Dalsheim, as I have the sense that things change here faster than anywhere else in Germany these days- and always for the better! There is a new vineyard site in the Keller portfolio this year, and it is a very exciting new addition, as it comes from one of the very finest slate-based vineyards in all of the Rheinhessen, the Niersteiner Pettenthal. Klaus-Peter has taken out a long-term lease on parcel in the vineyard to start with and has produced some absolutely beautiful wines from this steep slate vineyard in 2009, and fans of the estate will now have another vineyard that they will simply have to add to their shopping list of “must have” Keller wines. The vines in the Pettenthal were all planted in 1978 and are in the very steepest section of the vineyard, all on red slate soils. The vines are owned by the family of Franz-Karl Schmidt, who was one of the most famous producers in the Rheinhessen in the first half of the twentieth century. Klaus- Peter has made absolutely profound wines from the Pettenthal in his first vintage, with the vineyard showing itself to be capable of magical summits both as a dry wine and in the more classical, noble sweet styles. In fact, the 2009 Pettenthal Kabinett is so
Page 1 and 2: VIEW FROM THE CELLAR By John Gilman
Page 3 and 4: drink in their delicious youths. I
Page 5 and 6: array of dry wines. Like the noble
Page 7: my Burgundy stage of the trip and t
Page 11 and 12: Pinot Noir 2008 Bürgel Spätburgun
Page 13 and 14: 2009 Westhofener Morstein Riesling
Page 15 and 16: taste the new releases from Weingut

VIEW FROM THE CELLAR - Keller Wein

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