The last wine of the flight was a baroque dry white that was powerful and deeply structured with notes of candied orange peel and dried apricot. Sure, it had some bottle maturation character, but it was very much alive. Then the organizer of the tasting, Ralf Frenzel, the charismatic and garrulous publisher of the German-language FINE magazine, stood up and told us that it was from a forgotten vintage. “Fifteen, but not 2015,” he said. “It is from 1915!”
The be precise, the wine was a dry riesling from the winery in the Rheingau of Germany that is today called Kloster Eberbach. But more than a century ago, the winery’s name was very different, so we are talking about the Staatliche Domänen-Weinbauverwaltung, Eltville Riesling Rheingau Erbacher Marcobrunn 1915.
The group of tasters broke into spontaneous applause, and what a group it was. From Bordeaux there were Bruno-Eugene Borie from Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou in St. Julien, Olivier Bernard of Domaine de Chevalier in Pessac-Leognan and Stephanie de Bouard-Rivoal from Chateau Angelus in St. Emilion. Then there were Peter Sisseck from Pingus in the Ribero del Duero region of Spain, Renzo Cotarella, the chief winemaker of Antinori in Italy, and Jean-Luc Pepin, the director of Domaine Comte Georges de Vogue in Burgundy.
What was such an illustrious group of tasters doing at the medieval Kloster Eberbach monastery up in the woods at the northern edge of the Rheingau in Germany? Well, as almost every one of them said to me at some point during the proceedings, it isn’t every day that you get to taste nearly 100 vintages stretching back to the legendary 1893.
The state-owned Kloster Eberbach winery name has changed several times from1893 to today, as Germany became a republic in 1918 and the modern German state was founded after World War II. So don’t be surprised by the complex wine names in the tasting notes below.
One thing didn’t change, though. This was and is one of the largest vineyard owners in Germany, with more than 120 hectares (280 acres), the great majority in the top sites of the Rheingau region. Not the least of these is the more than 30-hectare monopole Steinberg site, a walled vineyard comparable to the Grand Cru Clos Vougeot in Burgundy. Like it, the Steinberg was established by Cistercian monks during the early Middle Ages.
However, great traditions of wine quality, like those of Kloster Eberbach, are not a guarantor of future success. When James Suckling and started out tasting German wines in the early 1980s, this winery was one of a string of important Rheingau underperformers with erratic quality. Thank goodness things have changed since then!
Many steps were necessary along the long path to matching past glories. When Dieter Grainer, the winery’s director since 2000, appointed Kathrin Puff as winemaker in early 2018, the final, decisive measure was taken. But that wasn’t obvious to most people at the time.
You see, James and I got to know Puff a decade ago when she was the winemaker for Monsoon Valley Vineyard in Hua Hin, Thailand, which is not exactly the place most consumers around Planet Wine consider the home of great wine. We saw that she was doing remarkable things, but I promise you not everyone did.
On top of this, Kloster Eberbach was a big ship to turn around, so there were plenty of people who were skeptical of Grainer’s daring decision to hire Puff. For us, however, that choice has been fully vindicated by the wines Puff has made the last couple of years.
This tasting really demonstrated what the Kloster Eberbach team has to live up to. Some of the highest-rated wines are legends of the kind that even I rarely get to taste.
The perfect-scoring Verwaltung der Staatsweingüter, Eltville Rauenthaler Bailen Riesliing Rheingau Trockenbeerenauslese 1949 and Staatliche Domänen-Weinbauverwaltung, Eltville Steinberger Riesling Rheingau Trockenbeerenauslese 1921 are fabulous and unique wines; the former a giant of finesse and complexity, the latter a giant of unctuous concentration. These are lusciously sweet essences of the greatest vintages in the first and second halves of the 20th century.
But the majority of the riesling wines in the tasting were dry or almost dry. The Königlich Preussischen Domänen-Keller Riesling Rheingau Rüdesheim Hinterhaus 1893 was one of the almost dry wines and still delicious at 130 years of age. It balanced firm structure and herbal character with just a touch of sweetness and a wide spectrum of stone fruit aromas.
No less extraordinary was the way a large number of dry wines from lesser vintages showed remarkably well. I think this had a lot to do with dedicated work in the vineyard and the winemaking methods pre-1960. The Staatliche Domänen-Weinbaubverwaltung, Eltville Riesling Rheingau Rüdesheimer Stumpfenort 1935 and Staatliche Domänen-Weinbaubverwaltung, Riesling Rheingau Rauenthaler Gehrn 1918 are excellent examples of this.
In those days, it typically took two to three years for the wines to naturally clarify, filtration of the modern kind not being available. The wines remained in wooden casks (of more or less neutral wood) and were racked once every six months. After each racking, there was less lees in the barrel. This extended yeast contact did much to resolve small disharmonies that are normal in the dry wines of lesser vintages.
Of course, there’s a sentimental aspect to tasting wines like these – 1935 is my mother’s birth year and World War I ended in 1918 – but the entire tasting was blind, so this factor had no direct influence on the results.
Tasters often guessed the wines to be several decades younger than they really were. This is due to the enormous aging potential of great rieslings, dry and sweet. I’ve been aware of this for a long while, but I had no time for guessing games due to the demanding task of writing all the notes.
Of course, these wines are not easy to come by, but they pop up at auctions right around Planet Wine from time to time. Depending upon how many collectors spot them, prices vary wildly, but there are sometimes bargains to be had. Then there are the auctions Kloster Eberbach itself regularly stages, but bargains are rare on these occasions because all the collectors watch them like hawks.
However you manage to make it work, I strongly recommend you experience some of these wines. We live in a wine world where most whites are made for immediate consumption and dry whites that reach a decade of age in good shape are often presented as well nigh miraculous. These liquid time machines put all of that into perspective!
– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor
