The only 2012’s I’ve tasted so far were at Terry Thiese’s trade tasting in June, and Rudi Wiest’s “Dry Wine Tour” in April (I was unable to attend his tasting of the sweeter wines he imports). I thought all of the wines showed really good depth, balance, and complexity, with the usual suspects particularly good. For Rudi, that means Rebholz and Wagner-Stempel, and I thought the Silvaners of Wirsching were also excellent. Rudi imports quite a few Pinot Noirs as well, and I found much better balance and less oak-dominant than in previous years. Terry presented fewer producers this year than last, but I thought Lietz was particularly successful, and I was impressed by the von Winning wines, which are rather atypical and controversial due to their more obvious oak influence–to me they have the stuffing to back it up and integrate the oak with some time. We’ll see. Donnhoff was excellent as usual.
Yes. I wrote a fairly lengthy report on this tasting last year, and I’ll plan to do the same again this time around.
Charlie, glad to hear you are a Steinmetz fan - I love what Stefan is doing. Truly a creative young winemaker with a vision. Thanks to Lyle Fass for helping me set up that visit - I’m really looking forward to doing my writeup from that one.
I was in the mosel last week, and tasted a good range of 2012 dry and halbtrocken at Selbach-Oster: they taste crisp, expressive, pure. Already very enjoyable. I like these much, and I think that this winery is getting more and more depth in their wines.
Some other 2012 tasted around there also gave me the impression of nice acidity and very expressive wines.
Florian
Really hard to determine as such a young category. I’d say 4-6 years in a general sense but the outliers like Rebholz and Frohlich seem to need more time.
An '05 Karthäuserhof Auslese Trocken “s” recently was mind-numbing. That is now called a GG today.