It is the right vintage for its Moment. Could we have absorbed a luxury-vintage, yet again?

But beware of assuming the 2008s are “small” wines or that the vintage is “average” or any other thing that damns it with faint praise. No, it is not a great classic like 2001 or 2005, but if it is a baseline vintage then it signifies how high that baseline has risen. It may be modest, but it isn’t simple. There are very few wines tasting inadequately ripe, and very many wines with a dense extract-driven complexity that crams them with flavor even without buxom sugar levels.

The summer was cool and wet the way it used to be most years before the improbable string of warm years starting with 1988. A period of warm rain in early September gave many growers the spooks. Was another 2000 about to be unleashed? But no, the weather stabilized and most important it cooled; the days were brisk and the nights were almost frosty. Vine leaves started to yellow and assimilation was slowed, so picking was prolonged and very late even by German standards. Even where sugar-ripeness was attained the acids were still too high. So they waited.

What they finally picked was as ripe as it could be but with acids sometimes still awkwardly high. Only at the tail end of picking, in early to mid-November did I start receiving those emails “Great picking today, potentially exciting stuff.” Bear in mind this is all relative to the assumptions of modern times. Here’s an example: on the Mosel you can make “Kabinett” with Riesling at 72º Oechsle (19 Brix). Spätlese starts at 78º and if I recall correctly, Auslese begins at either 84º or 86º, with BA starting at 112º. Obviously no conscientious grower pays any heed to this blatant nonsense. That said, recent vintages have also provided him that luxury, to disdain the silly standards of the miserable 1971 wine law. But it’s a long way from there to some of the “Kabinetts” of vintage 2006, which had over 100º and were close to (legal) Beerenauslese! Last year at Christoffel one of my colleagues said “At last, typical Kabinett again…” but the 07s were still packing must-weights in the low-90s – legal “Auslese” but in fact the prevailing standard for modern Spätlese from a good grower.

In 2008 the “Kabinett wines” have degrees in the mid to high 80s and occasionally higher, so they are lighter than any vintage since 2004. Yet they are still overqualified by the wine-law’s lax standards. A Mosel must of 85º is at least what used to be thought of as a “good” Spätlese.

Time for the headlines. The vintage is good everywhere, but better as you go south, so that the Pfalz has a really wonderful vintage that’s probably its best since 1998, provided you measure by the actual taste of the wines and not by the proportion of Auslese and other mega-musts.

In fact 1998 is the year 2008 is most aligned to. I remember those early 98s and they’re often echoed here. 2008 wines are, above all, LONG. My notes also started repeating the phrase “mineral core,” and I really tasted extract as a palpable material nucleus. In the Pfalz these extracts are shockingly high. “Thickly mineral and long” is the quick & dirty descriptor I’d use. So yes, it’s a lighter vintage, most of whose wines are (well-endowed) Kabinetts and very fine Spätlese. Very little Auslese, thank god! First because conditions were seldom propitious and second because few growers wanted to go all out in any case. Everyone has enough Auslese.

I really like these wines. That’s partly because I prize minerality and wines with extract-driven density. Again and again I was happy with the amount of substance these ostensibly light wines were showing. And I am really stoked with the Pfalz, especially after all the miseries it has had to endure over the past decade. At least five of my Pfälzers made better wines in 08 than in 07 – and 07 is excellent. What’s often most impressive in 2008 is the eerie perfection shown by several of the lightest wines. It’s as if they’re saying “We may not have gotten a lot of sugar but we got a ton of everything else.”  2008 is the first vintage I’ve ever written three plusses for a Kabinett wine. So don’t forget, it may be “normal” but it’s far from ordinary.

There is a single overriding theme, and it is acidity. Many of the young growers, (pretty much anyone with fewer than twelve vintages under his belt), have no experience with a really high-acid vintage. And because most of their wines are dry, and because many are sold and drunk within a year, these 08s cannot go into bottle with the acids they naturally had. Thus we see a lot of deacidification. One guy said “Everyone deacidified, but not everyone will admit it.” So I tried to phrase the question as a pragmatic issue with a range of possibilities any reasonable person would tolerate. Tryin’ to get me some truth. Even some of the veteran growers seemed to have forgotten what an obstreperous acid vintage was like, and most of all I felt they’d lost their tolerance for acid levels they’d have left alone twenty years ago. And so a number of growers deacidified, including many who said they’d never do it – and who had the luxury of saying so when they thought they’d never need to.

These things constitute a kind of zeitgeist of the palate. Back in the early 90s we had a string of years with pronounced acids: 90 itself, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, and I wonder whether we’d tolerate them now. 1990 was at the epicenter of a related idea  that sweetness should be as low as possible; there were plenty of Rieslings in the 35-55 g.l. range with 10 grams of acid. They’d be freaks today, but we found them classic back then. I recently had a bottle of 1990 and found this note, which seems to sum it up.

When no individual component is conspicuous, the wine is balanced. But a flaw in balance can be fascinating. The 90 Auslese from Reuscher-Haart (Piesporter Goldtröpfchen) has a visible excess of acidity, as was usually the case with the 90s. If it had been sweeter by 20 grams/liter, this would have been blanketed, but that wasn’t the zeitgeist back then; everyone wanted to tamp the sweetness down as far as they could. But the results were less than one might have wished, which I find interesting. Also, the spiky acids were at first almost invisible beneath a huge foam of youthful fruit. We felt the electricity and tasted the depth of fruit and thought the wines were profound – as some were. But with hindsight 1990 is an important and generally excellent vintage, but one with a common problem, some of which was man-made. So in this flaw there’s a bunch of stories being told, about how to relate to acidity as an agent of balance, about how often we mistake a vintage’s quality in our first euphoria, about how we’re so often wrong about sweetness being an evil which must at all costs be minimized, about how we’re misled into thinking the high-acid years will age best. That said, the wine was very good and there were many good THINGS about it, even because of its “flaw.”

There are several methods to deacidify. The easiest and cheapest is to use chalk, but this has the effect of removing mostly tartaric acid, so the resulting wine has less total acid but a higher proportion of the tart malic variety. I noticed in a few such wines a bitter note, either exposed or caused by deacidification. Removing sharpness only to reveal bitterness wasn’t much of a bargain, in my view. The biggest pain-in-the-ass method is called “Doppelsalz,” wherein a portion of the wine has all its acidity removed, and is then re-blended back into the whole. This ensures the original proportions of acidity remain intact. But it’s a lot more work and it’s also more expensive. I have a few growers who adamantly refused to touch acids (I was tempted to say drop acids…) and Walter Strub – bless his stubborn heart – told me “It’s like decapitating a wine,” adding “All you need is time and the wines balance themselves, but not if you have to sell the wine in February.”

How will the vintage age, then? Will it be aged? Or will we accept it as an unusually good interesting “normal” vintage we don’t have to make cellar-space for? Bearing in mind this question is never answered with more than hopeful guess work, I see no reason the 08s won’t age perfectly well, but they’ll zig-zag their way and they’ll go through the shadows. They’re temperamental, not sanguine. It’s not impossible they’ll show some green notes in a couple years, as the 98s did. If you want a vintage to drink young without guilt, may I propose 2008, bitte? I plan to drink most of them young, when their minerality is at its most expressive. I’ll put away the 15-20% or so that seem to warrant it, but I’ll even drink a few of those bottles early because I like how they taste now.

A few hardy souls risked Eiswein, and those who did had good results, though these were picked between December 30 and January 5 and so were still hard to peer into. I saw almost no BA or TBA, which was something of a relief. I hate to sound jaded, but I’m starting to wonder whether this is perhaps an error of concept in the German wine culture, that grape-sugars should be pursued as an absolute value. I’m being a little unreasonable; I well remember the times when decades would pass between vintages when such wines were even possible. And one grower rebuked me; “Terry, we don’t always set about to make BA or TBA, often the grapes are out there anyway,  and what else should we do with them?” So I see the point. But I also see a problem when ripeness and concentration are sought as though more is always better,  and if you don’t believe me just look at the “scores” given the wines, which seem to climb in lock-step with must-weights. The greatest expression of German Riesling comes in a great Spätlese. Certain Auslesen can equal it, as can certain Kabinetts. But I no longer am convinced that a BA or TBA automatically constitutes a quintessence. A few of them do, but for each one of these there are fifty that taste like fig juice with white-raisin nectar, at least to my pitiful obtuse palate.

Don’t let me forget to tell you how über-cool the SCHEUREBE is in 2008! Kinky and edgy and feral, just the way we like ‘em.

HIGHLIGHTS AND SUPERLATIVES

The Winery Of The Vintage is……Wow, von Othegraven, For an ethereal collection of quintessential Saar wines that haunted me for days and from which I recovered wine memories of my earliest days when every sip of such a thing was miraculous. But this was a hard choice, because the two runners-up were objectively as good. Christoffel  has his greatest vintage since 2001, every single wine a stirring masterpiece, and wonderfully also Meßmer  has perhaps the best vintage they’ve ever made, deep into territory only Müller-Catoir has ever explored. But Othegraven’s wines take me back to a kind of pre-cognitive state I remember when I first tasted great Saar Riesling: How on earth can this thing BE? I know they’re expensive and misaligned with the market, but if you have room for a splurge, make it this one.

Other Outstanding Collections….that is, sustained superlative performance over the entire vintage:

Wagner-Stempel Like duh, big surprise! This is the superstar no-longer-emerging in the Rheinhessen, and you heard it here first. Actually, you heard it three years ago here first.

Darting (who will also appear as comeback kids, but this is their best vintage in memory)

Eugen Müller

Dr Deinhard

Müller-Catoir (assuming the dry Rieslings justify the promise they showed. The Rieslaner series was beyond belief or description.)

Hexamer

Loewen/Schmitt-Wagner (now a single entity as of the 08 vintage, and firing on all cylinders.)

COMEBACK-KIDS OF THE YEAR   GROWERS WHOSE 2008S ARE MARKEDLY SUPERIOR TO THE PREVAILING LEVEL OF THE PAST FEW YEARS:

Darting

Meßmer

Dr Deinhard

Eugen Müller

THE WINE OF THE VINTAGE IS:

Von Othegraven Kanzemer Altenberg Riesling Kabinett

RUNNERS-UP INCLUDE:

Müller-Catoir Haardter Herzog Rieslaner Spätlese

Meßmer Rieslaner Spätlese

Hexamer Meddersheimer Rheingrafenberg Riesling Spätlese 2-star

Schlossgut Diel  Dorsheimer Pittermännchen Riesling Spätlese

Schmitt-Wagner Longuicher Maximiner Herrenberg Riesling Spätlese

Christoffel Erdener Treppchen Riesling Auslese 2-star

Selbach-Oster Zeltinger Himmelreich Riesling Spätlese “Anrecht”

THE AUSLESE OF THE VINTAGE IS:

Müller-Catoir Haardter Herzog Rieslaner Auslese

THE SCHEUREBE OF THE VINTAGE IS:

I may have to retire this category as the winners are always Diel and Müller-Catoir. As they are again!

THE KABINETTS OF THE VINTAGE ARE:

(excluding Othegraven’s wine-of-the-vintage…)

Weingart Bopparder Hamm Riesling Kabinett Feinherb

Adam Hofberg Riesling Kabinett

THE BIGGEST SURPRISES OF THE VINTAGE ARE:

Strub  Grüner Veltliner (which should now have the Austrians peering nervously over their shoulders….)

Darting Riesling “Classic” (a bureaucratic category I detest, but a wine I couldn’t resist)

Dr Deinhard  Langenmorgen Riesling Grosses Gewächs  (the best dry Riesling ever from here, and a harbinger of greatness to come under the new regime.)

Selbach-Oster “Rotlay” (because it is a naked gesture of terroir and as profound, and masculine, as Mosel Riesling can be.)

THE GREATEST CORE-LIST WINES ARE:

(redundant, as they’d be the Adam Kabinett and the Othegraven Kabinett already lionized…)

THE GREATEST DRY WINES ARE:

Gotta go plural now since there’s so many hip ones!

Wagner-Stempel  Heerkretz Riesling Grosses Gewächs

Eugen Müller  Forster Freundstück Riesling Spätlese Trocken (wow!)

Meßmer Michelsberg Riesling Grosses Gewächs

THE ABSOLUTE TOP VALUES:

Darting  Rieslaner BA (and what a wine)

Merkelbach just about everything in 08.

Selbach  Saar Riesling (best value of the vintage!)

SHORT-LIST FOR ROCKHEADS:

Meßmer  Burrweiler Schäwer Riesling Spätlese

Schlossgut Diel  Eierfels Riesling

Clüsserath  Trittenheimer Apotheke Riesling Kabinett

Selbach-Oster “Schmitt”

SHORT-LIST FOR FRUIT AND CHARM HOUNDS:

Bernhard Hackenheimer Kirchberg Scheurebe Kabinett

Kruger-Rumpf  Münsterer Rheinberg Riesling Kabinett

Loewen  Leiwener Laurentiuslay Riesling Spätlese

Kerpen Graacher Himmelreich Riesling Spätlese

THE MOST PERFECT IMAGINEABLE FOOD-WINES:

No restaurant should be without them, nor should any self-respecting fridge….

Eugen Müller Forster Pechstein Riesling Kabinett Halbtrocken

Biffar Riesling “Josephine”

Schlossgut Diel  Burg Layen Riesling Kabinett

Kerpen Graacher Himmelreich Riesling Spätlese Feinherb

Selbach-Oster Riesling Spätlese