Among my riesling hoarding adventures, I’m looking to do some backfilling on certain German sweet wines such as the numbered cask auslesen from Von Schubert Maximin Grunhaus. I enjoy a little botrytis, but not too heavy and overwhelming where all I get is honey and beeswax notes. While tasting notes for some bottles mention how heavy the botrytis is for that wine, it doesn’t always and I think it would be helpful to have a sense of which vintages saw a lot of it. Short of trying to dig through all the back issues of vintage reports from Mosel Fine Wines, what vintages were associated with heavy or “not clean” botrytis that I may want to avoid?
1989
Unfortunately I don’t think you are going to be able to sort out which producers have botrytis in certain wines, and which have clean botrytis, or a little or a lot, by seeking particular vintages. I think if you really want to narrow it down to “just a little clean botrytis” you are going to have to rely on contemporaneous notes of who did what with what wine. Good luck!
I’m not experienced with old German rieslings but is it really true that more botrytis always drowns out everything else? I’ve had so many Sauternes that must have been packed with botrytis and had no shortage of apricot, tropical fruit, nutty, spicy notes etc etc
Classic botrytis descriptors. Although nuttiness is more likely from either oak aging or just bottle age, depending how old the wine is.
Apart from high acidity, it’s quite high to discern heavily botrytized Riesling from any other heavily botrytized white variety. Botrytis not only overwhelms the varietal characteristics, but as the grape gets a botrytis infection and is shriveled by the fungus, many of its flavor precursors get destroyed in the process. Botrytized grapes tend to taste like botrytized grapes, not of its varietal characteristics - although there are some varieties that can retain some of their varietal flavor quite well, like Sauvignon Blanc, Muscat and Gewürztraminer.
2006 is another big botrytis year.
I think of 1976 and 1989 as big botrytis years and 1983, 1990 and 2010 as vintages with less botrytis. That said, the 1989 Grunhaus Abtsberg Auslese #96 is spectacular and could change your opinion.
I recommend for you GKA from 2010. Try, esp., GKA from Schloss Lieser and Reinhold Haart.
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Thanks for the tips all.
Otto, I thought botrytis mostly imparted beeswax and honey notes.
I was under the, possibly inaccurate, impression that beeswax is a varietal characteristic unrelated to botrytis.
I associate botrytis most with that spice note it imparts, which I find distinct from ginger or jasmine notes I might find in non-botrytized Rieslings. I believe it also concentrates flavor, which I love.
In my experience, I can almost always tell dessert Riesling from Sauternes and usually other dessert wines, regardless of botrytis.
I find that both honey and beeswax can be associated with completely non-botrytized german riesling. To me a mushroom (good), woolen (sometimes ok) or musty (not so good) note is a telltale indicator of botrytis in the mosel. Anything that indicates a concentration of sugar may no doubt be one of the effects of botrytis but could also just be a very sweet wine without botrytis (for example, try one of the Zilliken LGK with no botrytis - made from just shriveled berries with no rot - and you will get lots of the honeyed and apricot notes that people often associate with botrytis), but to me when I am trying to pick out botrytis I am looking for something that indicates rot.
Alex
Grilled peaches for me, every time. It may not work for you but its almost ubiquitous for me!
I appreciate honey notes in aged riesling, but find them to be too prominent or overwhelming with additional beeswax notes (sometimes ginger as stated above) in wines that I thought had a good dose of botrytis. Maybe I’m mistaken.
You may well be completely correct. I find that for me it can be very tricky to pick out botrytis. If you look at Mosel Fine Wine’s notes, there is no common descriptor that applies consistently across botrytized wine. There are lots of references to smoke and cream when they talk about wines with botrytis, but those descriptors often appear in wines without rot. The same is true of grilled fruits, which they often refer to in dry or feinherb wines. I look for instances of rot not because I think I’m somehow picking up all botrytized wines, but because I think I’m getting at least a subset of wines where I’m fairly certain that botrytis is there, notwithstanding my inability to catch many others. I’m trying to be right a portion of the time even though I know that it will lead me to being wrong a lot of the time. I’ve spent too much time thinking about this over the last four or five years (and drinking it) and would love to find some easy answer, but so far I don’t have one.
Alex
I agree. And, within Sauternes and Barsac, I find that it’s often easy to tell the difference between those with more sauvignon and those with more semillon. Though, certainly, one can be fooled!
Me too - although for the most part it’s because Sauvignon Blanc-heavy Sauternes wines tend to be slightly lighter in body and higher in acidity than those with more notable proportion of Sémillon. And it also helps that Sauvignon Blanc tends to retain its varietal characteristics a bit better.
But for the most part what botrytis does to grapes is that it degrades glucose into gluconic acid, which is one of the key compounds in making a botrytized wines smell and taste how they do (it also lends honey its distinctive aroma!). In essence, gluconic acid makes a botrytized wine smell like honey and beeswax, apricots and pineapples and orange marmalade. Some of these aromas can be varietal aromas for, say, a ripe Sémillon or a late-harvested Riesling, so it can get quite impossible to tell where the varietal aromas end and where the botrytis influence begins. However, I’ve had many wines I’ve thought they were Riesling Auslese (or even Beerenauslese) with noticeable botrytis influence, but they turned out to be something completely different.
For the most part, I think it’s very hard to find much varietal aromas in noticeably botrytized wines. It’s often very easy to pick up a Sauternes/Barsac or a Tokaji - I’m quite certain I’d never confuse a Sauternes for a Tokaji or a botrytized Riesling - but more often than not it’s because of the winemaking and acidity in these wines than because of the varietal characteristics. Sauternes tends to be more unctuous, oily in body, higher in alcohol, lower in acidity and more often than not has a somewhat noticeable oak influence - although this tends to differ from producer to producer. Tokaji, instead, often tastes more intensely concentrated with zippier acidity and lighter body. While some oak use differs from one producer to another, Tokaji never seems to come across as oaky as Sauternes and quite often they show no obvious oak influence at all. And botrytized Riesling never seems to see any oak (unless it’s a large, neutral fuder) and while they can be as high in acidity as Tokaji wines, I’d argue they are either lighter with less botrytis influence than in Tokaji, unless we get to TBA level, where they tend to be heavier and more concentrated than Tokajis at same botrytis level - although there’s definitely some stylistic variation depending on the vintage and on the producer.
If there was a blind tasting of, say, a botrytized Chenin Blanc, a botrytized Riesling, a botrytized Chardonnay and a botrytized Furmint, all the wines vinified in a similar way (for example completely in stainless steel) and they had more or less the same amount of residual sugar and acidity, I’m quite positive it would be very difficult to discern which wine was made from which variety. With a small botrytis influence it is often somewhat doable, because especially Riesling has a rather strong varietal character so a small amount of botrytis wouldn’t overwhelm that, but I’d argue that at Beerenauslese level (and above), discerning varietal differences is getting nigh impossible.
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So why do clear qualitative differences remain if varietal ones don’t?
This is a good post!
Honey / beeswax even in Chardonnay can also be an indicator of low yields and concomitant high ripeness; passerillage; muscaté selections of Chardonnay, rather than botrytis.
Your botrytis tells are spot on also, and equally applicable to Chardonnay in humid years in Burgundy as they are to Riesling.
Because they aren’t vinified in the same way. And I’m not sure that varietal differences don’t remain either.
Chateau Guiraud uses more Sauvignon Blanc than any other producer I’m aware of in Sauternes, and it’s only 35% these days. But you can distinguish their wine from the others because of it. When it was closer to 50%, it was more apparent. The wines with only Semillon tend to be more syrupy.
BAs and TBAs tend not to have wood influence, so they lack that dimension, and Riesling by nature is more acidic than Semillon, which is why those wines tend not to be as syrupy. Clear varietal difference.
Coteaux du Layon on the other hand, doesn’t get the intensity of botrytis that other areas might, as it’s slightly away from the water. So it keeps more of the Chenin character, which always strikes me as grass. There are also different requirements regarding sugar - Coteaux du Layon sweet wines will have sugar of 100 g/L, whereas Quart de Chaume, next door, will have 200 g/L. At least if memory serves - it’s been a while and I haven’t been there for a long time. And some use oak, others don’t. Also, they were, and I think still are, able to use cryo-extraction, as in Sauternes, so sometimes you’re getting an ice wine blend with your botrytized wine.
Some Layon producers pick a small percentage of the grapes almost unripe, to give their wine the extra acidity it needs to combat the high sugar in the later-picked grapes that get hit with the botrytis. That, plus the lower sugar levels, makes some of those wines more interesting to me, and it’s exactly why Tokaji-Aszú is usually a better bet than Sauternes, at least to me. The balance of acidity and sweetness prevents the wine from being cloying. I’m not talking about Eszencia, which is a bit of an aberration that was never sold as wine in the past. And while you don’t have screamingly obvious varietal characteristics, you most definitely do get them when you have wines made from different grapes. I’ve had 100% Muscat Tokaji-Aszú and it’s obviously still Muscat, very different from Furmint or Hárslevelű.
Botrytis tends to hide some varietal differences, but not all. It depends in part on the extent of the botrytis and also on what compounds are responsible for what we associate with the various varietal flavors, because they’re not all affected equally. In Otto’s hypothetical, all the grapes are vinified the same way. My guess is that you’ll still be able to tell which is which, but we aren’t likely to have those kinds of opportunities, and they aren’t vinified in the same way.
Other than the wines from Tokaj, which can be made from various grapes in different proportions, some of the Austrian wines can be compared by variety as they’re made the same way. Kracher made TBAs from Welschriesling, Chardonnay, Scheurebe, and pretty much anything that he could find, and those wines retain their differences.
Funny, because I was just thinking about these when I composed my hypothetical! 
Like I posited earlier, some varieties retain their varietal characteristics better, so TBAs made from varieties like Rosenmuskateller or Muskat retained their floral varietal character, but for example I couldn’t tell any varietal differences in wines made from Scheurebe, Chardonnay or Welschriesling. You could easily tell the wines apart from each other due to the differences in acidity, residual sugar, botrytis influence or possible oak use, but for me, any aromatic varietal differences very pretty much overwhelmed by botrytis. If served blind, I wouldn’t have had any chance saying “this is obviously Chardonnay” or “this must be Welschriesling”, even though I probably would’ve told apart dry white wines made from Scheurebe, Chardonnay or Welschriesling by their varietal qualities.
I believe recent vintages of Doisy-Daene l’Extravagant are mostly if not completely Sauvignon Blanc though to your point it’s not their main cuvee