German Catalog 2006 USE THIS ONE.qxp - Michael Skurnik Wines

practices what he preaches, which takes unusual courage
in the topsy-turvy modern German wine market.
One wonders how Leitz’s clear-headed honesty sits
with the high priests of the VDP.
Johannes is done with his various building projects;
the press-house is finished, the tasting room’s there (and
I’m sure the jacuzzi and the twin skee-ball lanes won’t be
far behind), the family’s out from under a range of
health-related challenges . . . and then there’s you, dear
reader. You have been buying these wines with great
vim, and this is a good thing! It’s all rather giddy but you
know, it makes me happy. Because Johannes Leitz has it
all. He’s a perfect expression of my holy trinity of value:
soil, family, artisanality. His connection to his vines is a
priori and intimate. His scale permits – relishes – a degree
and type of attention any industrial wine producer (and
many other artisans) would think insane. He’s close to
every part of it; the wine he drinks with you in your
restaurant, having fun (and studying your response,
Universally regarded as one of the three rising stars of the new
leitz at a glance:
generation of Rheingauers (with Künstler and Weil).
Extraordinarily aromatic, vigorous wines from a vintner who grows more commanding
each vintage.
They have the lusty vitality of wines that were never
how the wines taste:
racked; he bottles them off the gross lees from the casks
in which they fermented. “A lot of people talk about ‘yeast-contact’ but I think I’m the
only one who actually does it.” And it’s not your garden-variety leesiness either. Leitz’s
lees express somehow sweetly, like semolina. I drank the 2000 Schlossberg Spätlese H-T,
and it was like semolina dumplings in a sweetly fragrant mix of veal and vegetable
broth. No other wines are like them. They have a remarkable reconciliation of weight,
solidity and buoyancy. They tend to run stony, as is the Rheingau type—when it’s true!
And they are fastidiously specific in their site characteristics. The dry wines are better
than most! Still, almost none of Johannes’ wines taste “sweet.” They have the coiled
power of a tightly closed fist. They are intensely fragrant, as though they wished to
convince you of something. They are like Wachau wines; they crave oxygen, and they
don’t show their best ice-cold. They are, to my way of thinking, the most exciting wines
currently made in the Rheingau and they didn’t get there with bazillions of yen or with
mega-technology or with a Kantian superstructure of philosophy: Just a man, his dog,
and their wines.
THE DRY RIESLINGS:
believe me!), is the wine he nurtured himself, from pruning
to binding to trimming to canopy-thinning to greenharvesting
to selective multiple hand-harvesting to
inspecting the fruit to fermenting in individual small lots
to monitoring to aging on the lees to tasting again and
again to determine the best moment for bottling, and
finally . . . to doing it all again.
Often I go to Spreitzer in the morning, and than to
Leitz, which means I’m tasting Johannes’ dry wines right
after tasting Spreitzer’s sweetest ones. Not good. So this
year I asked if I could taste them all together, dry with
dry. The results were revelatory. Spreitzer’s wines are
perfectly in line with the prevailing modern idiom:
super-clean, transparent, elegant, keenly chiseled wines,
of a kind we all love. But with the first sniff of a Leitz
wine it was as if the windows were thrown open and all
the “standard references’ hurled out onto the ground.
Leitz is such an original he’ll either create a “school” of
his own or simply be 1-of-a-kind.
This year I decided to concentrate on the uppermost level of Leitz’s dry wines. There’s
plenty of competition for everyday-priced Riesling, but Leitz is one of the few in
Germany who regularly makes world-class dry wines from Grand Cru sites. These may
be expected to be quite meaty in 2005, and my notes are doubtless conservative.
GJL-115 2005 Rüdesheimer Berg Schlossberg Riesling Trocken
A delicate slate wine, fragrance of lilacs; palate is sinewy and spring-oniony; a mannerly,
winsome wine.
SOS: 0 (1-5 years, again 14-19 years)
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RHEINGAU WINES