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

florian weingart
mittelrhein • boppard-spay
Florian Weingart seems self-conscious about the accolades regularly heaped upon him, like
putting on a tux and looking at yourself in the mirror and thinking “Who is this guy?” He was
“promoted” to top estate of the Mittelrhein by Gault-Millau, in a class by himself, but he only
blushed when I hailed him as “Mr. 4-Stars!” Nor do I think this is mere modesty. Florian is exceptionally
thoughtful and driven, constantly cogitating, guessing and second-guessing, always trying
to improve. All the praise is nice, but distracting.
These are very happy visits. The wines are full of melody, and Florian’s kids keep coming
into the room, shyly at first and then like wound-up little sprites. I like tasting wine with young
vintners whose kids are sitting in his lap. It stops me
from getting too precious about the wines. It puts the
work in context. Context is good. It helps me define a
thing I need to remember: the connection of the family,
the land, and the wine. Somehow I doubt I’d be tasting
with Mr. Kendall or Mr. Jackson in a little living room
with kids peering shyly around the corner and the simmer-fragrance
of lunch cooking. One year both girls
seized upon my Karen Odessa, who amused them for
two hours with her laptop. She recorded the two girls
very shyly singing “Ten Little Indians” and every time
she played it later I felt happy.
Florian is more of an intellectual than many growers.
“There is no single True way,” he says: “Rather a multitude
of possibilities.” I sense he’s delighted to play among
them! Florian has always been transparently candid and
unaffected with me, which I find unendingly delightful.
It’s such a pleasure to connect simply as colleagues. I
think he is instinctively genuine, as are his wines.
Florian is improving what were already excellent
wines, but I still miss his folks. Papa set a fine example of
diligence, fortitude and joy. He suffers from a degenerative
nerve ailment that deprives him of the use of his fingertips,
not an easy prospect for a small family-domain
on steep slopes. Yet he was invariably cheerful and
uncomplaining, and his wines were tensely fruity, and it
does the soul good to see a talented young man inspired
by the life of a vintner.
The wines are more green-fruity than they have
been, more explicitly
slatey, more
Mosel-like. Florian
ascribes this to
colder fermentations.
He also suggests
that the big
tropical-fruit flavors
of earlier
Weingart wines
resulted to some
extent from nitro-
Adolph Weingart
•Vineyard area: 22 hectares
•Annual production: 7,000 cases
•Top sites: Bopparder Hamm Engelstein,
Feuerlay & Ohlenberg, Schloss Fürstenberg
•Soil types: Weathered slate
•Grape varieties: 93% Riesling, 5% Spätburgunder,
2% Grauburgunder
gen fermentations. He’s also leaving his wines longer on
their lees, “partly to compensate for the loss of body
resulting from our colder fermemtation temperatures.”
And this gives them another dimension of complexity.
But you can’t do away entirely with those tropical
flavors; they are written into the soil. There’s a vein of
volcanic residue from eruptions in the old Eifel mountains
in the soils of the Bopparder Hamm, and it’s (presumably)
this soil which accounts for the bigger sweetfruit
expression in these wines. The Ohlenberg has a
deeper soil, giving more robust wines, more likely to
come from physiologically ripe fruit and therefore better
suited to Trocken styling. (Florian’s one of the few to
make this intuitive connection.)
We’d sell more of Florian’s wine if, ironically, the
Bopparder Hamm
were a lesser vineyard.
“The problem
with trying to
produce Kabinett
from the Hamm is
we’d have to pick
unripe grapes,” he
says. You’ll see
there’s a Kabinett
below, from the
vineyards around
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MITTELRHEIN WINES