Our wine tastings over the past week spanned our usual global footprint, from the Mosel region of Germany, where Senior Editor Stuart Pigott hit upon some excellent rieslings and spatburgunders, to Australia, where Senior Editor Ned Goodwin MW was tapping into a number of great wines, all representative of the country’s varied terroirs, while Senior Editor Zekun Shuai was tasting and rating some distinctive Spanish and Chinese wines in Hong Kong.
Stuart made a remarkable discovery in the form of Maximilian Knebel, a young Mosel winemaker who showed excellent dry rieslings from the second and third vintages of his garage winery. The most exciting of these was the Weinbau Maximilian Knebel Riesling Mosel Winninger Uhlen 2021, a sleek, concentrated and intensely mineral dry riesling. In every sense it is a brilliant wine.
The Uhlen is one of the top sites in the lower section of the long Mosel River that snakes its way through the hill country of the Eifel and Hunsruck. When James and Stuart started tasting German riesling back in the early 1980s, land in top sites like this rarely came up for sale or lease. The idea of a young winemaker getting his or her hands on it was absurd.
Maximilian Knebel is an excellent example of the new generation of young German winemakers who start with nothing yet are reaching for the stars with their first vintages. And it doesn’t bother him that, just like a young rock star starting out, he has to do a day job alongside tending his 0.6 hectares of vines.
Another remarkable wine was the Kloster Eberbach Spätburgunder Rheingau Berg Schlossberg GG 2020, Stuart said. This young pinot noir is incredibly silky and perfumed and hard to resist right now. It comes from one of the Rheingau’s top sites for dry riesling that is now showing it has great potential for pinot noir.
Kloster Eberbach lies at the opposite end of the scale of German wineries. It was a sleeping giant for a couple of decades until Kathrin Puff arrived as winemaker in April 2018. This wine is further proof of how in five years she has really turned the winery around. What makes this story a bit eye-popping is that Puff was previously the director of winemaking and viticulture for Siam Winery in Thailand, where James and Stuart first met her.
Also check out the wines of Markus Roll. 2022 was his first vintage at the Balthasar Ress winery in the Rheingau and he dramatically improved both the quality and stylistic consistency of the winery’s riesling and pinot noir offerings.
INIMITABLY AUSTRALIAN
After a long traipse about Italy and its panoply of indigenous grape varieties, geologies and drier, structurally focused expressions, Senior Editor Ned Goodwin MW has settled into Sydney life to taste some of Australia’s great wines.
“I accept the limitations of certain grape varieties and terroirs, just as I embrace the flamboyance and extravagant complexities and potentialities of others,” Ned said. “Yet like most odd creatures who taste wine for a living and forego the original set of dentures while doing so, I seek the sui generis. That benevolent confluence of place, all of its constructs and sleight of hand, that serve as the foundation for special wines. These are wines that move us by virtue of their inimitability; their transcendental capacity to tell a story, bring goosebumps and a giddy smile. Fortunately in Australia, there are plenty of these.”
Australia is huge, and wine is grown in many nooks in the country – from granitic sub-alpine reaches of granite, ferrous clays over limestone to maritime sands, ironstone screes, schist and fecund loams. It is also climatically and geologically diverse, and with a European level of consumption at about 29 liters per capita, wine is integral to celebrating this diversity.
Many of the wines Ned tasted over the past week were the sort of fresh, lithe and transparent wines that are reason for optimism. The Castagna Shiraz Beechworth Genesis 2019, for example, is a reflection of Julian Castagna’s love of Cote-Rotie and his comprehension of “the greats,” Ned said. With this wine, Castagna “chips away at the sub-alpine granites of Beechworth with biodynamic creed, sculpting a finely tuned, mid-weighted, aromatic and sinuous wine of wondrous complexity.”
The Alkina Grenache Polygon No. 3 2021, Ned said, “comes from schist shot with limestone that is fermented wild in combos of tulip-shaped concrete fermenters, eggs, amphorae, Georgian qvevri and large oak” that is “among the world’s greatest.”
This biodynamic, whole-bunch wine came from just 200 vines. Its pallid hue, modest alcohol, febrile energy and sapid red cherry, cranberry and dried thyme character make for ethereal stuff, Ned said. “If there’s such a thing as grenache being akin to pinot with a Mediterranean core, this is it.”
Ned continued: “Mount Terrible Pinot Noir 2016: unknown, even in Australia. Somewhere out yonder, abutting the Australian alps. Mountains that are modest, but ancient of turf. Savory. Aged sous-bois and carnal delights. Best, real tannins, serving to compress and jettison the flavors long. I tasted a near-vertical back to 2006. All intriguing.”
Finally, Ned said, there was the Frankland Estate Frankland River Olmo’s Reward 2020. Along with a suite of stunning riesling from Frankland Estate, like the Alter Weg 2022, the Olmo’s Reward is “a wonderful franc-dominant ode to Bordeaux’s Right Bank, where the founders worked many moons ago. Winemaker Hunter Smith cites ‘a really fine year’ and the use of ‘shallow ferments’ as responsible for the pixelated tannins. Biodynamic. Gravel and loam. The Great Southern wilderness.”
Our Hong Kong tastings featured more of bobal, the Spanish underdog variety that had once seemingly been on the path to oblivion. But thanks to the efforts of producers like Juan Antonio Ponce, bobal is on the comeback, and there may not be two better examples of how it showcases diverse expressions of terroir than Ponce’s single-vineyard wines from Manchuela, the Bodegas y Viñedos Ponce Bobal Manchuela La Estrecha 2021 and Bodegas y Viñedos Ponce Bobal Manchuela Pino 2021.
The elegant and refined La Estrecha comes from a single-vineyard plot rich in granitic soils and delivers a wine that is expressive, textured and mineral, while the Pino, which comes from limestone soils, gives more color, depth and verticality, showing off bobal’s austerity with bolder tannins and a Mediterranean flair. Another bobal we enjoyed was the Mikaela Bobal Tierra de Castilla La Infanta Viñas Viejas de Cuenca 2020 – a concentrated and more eclectic expression that shows integrated oak plushness with dark chocolate and fine spices to go along with its impressive depth of dark, balsamic fruit and powdery tannins.
Apart from bobal, a few varietal gracianos showed very well from Rioja despite the divergent paths the grape can sometimes take. Some winemakers we talked to believe it is difficult to tame and that its tannins can be too fierce, just like bobal. “No gracia (grace) with graciano, so gracias no (no thanks),” is the joking tongue-twister they use to describe their hesitation in working with it.
That said, Senior Editor Zekun Shuai liked the Altos de Rioja Graciano Rioja Pigeage 2021’s tangy, peppery lift from concentrated dark berries and graphite. It was one of the gracianos he tasted over the past week that delivered polished tannins with nervy character.
Zekun also tasted and rated a few Chinese wines, with the top scorers coming from Puchang Vineyard, which has consistently produced outstanding offerings over the last few vintages from the dry Turpan Valley of Xinjiang, including the Puchang Vineyard Rkatsiteli Xinjiang Turpan 蒲昌酒庄白羽 2020 and Puchang Vineyard Saperavi Turpan Viaseres 蒲昌酒庄精选纱布拉维 2017.
Once again, the rare Caucasian grape varieties found in China, rkatsiteli and saperavi, proved superb in expressing the terroir of the oasis Puchang Vineyard sits on amid the hot, dry and barren Turpan Valley. Rkatsiteli and saperavi were introduced to China in the 1950s, and the vines in Puchang were planted in 1975 by the former Turpan Winery.
Today, the winery helmed by Italian winemaker Loris Tartaglia and is farmed organically. It’s also one of the half-dozen wineries in China that consistently make excellent wines for reasonable prices.
– Stuart Pigott, Ned Goodwin MW and Zekun Shuai contributed reporting.
The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.
Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.
