Egon Muller

WINE TALK
41

€200 for the Auslese this year…

42

So I"m still pretty new to Riesling but absolutley love most of what I’ve had so far. Even though Egon Muller looks to be out of my price range this has been a very interesting read for me. I started collecting JJ Prum’s a little bit ago and was curious who’s next in line as far as quality. From most the reading here it seems like Egon Muller and Prum are both towards the top, but who else is there that’s worth huntiong down. So far I alos have a few Hoffmann-Simon and Selbach-Oster, am I missing out on any other great Riesling? Also I know very little about Riesling from Pfalz… Any suggestions from that region would be wonderful. Plus I love reading about Riesling and I don’t want this thread to go dead! [thankyou.gif]

43

try some:

Donnhoff
Willi Schaefer
Leitz
zilliken
Karthauserhof

Just to get started.

Not saying these are the “best” but they are some of my favorites. Taste widely and see what you like before collecting. There is no “best” just what best matches your preferences.

FWIW, prum isnt a great drinking young wine. Its really meant to be aged.

44

Excellent list here, esp. Karthauserhof. I’d add to that list the wines of J.J. Christoffel.

45

For the beginner (a class in which I put myself), I find it helpful to buy by importer. In Germany, here’s who I look for on the back of the label:

Mosel Wine Merchant
Terry Thiese/Michael Skurnik
Rudi Wiest

You really can’t go wrong with any of these.

46

Scharzhofberger is one of the greatest names in German wine, and Egon Müller has been producing exemplary Saar Rieslings from it over several generations. The property owns well-placed plots of gnarly old vines in the original Scharzhofberg. This side valley site, like other top Saar vineyards, has weathered gray slate and is windy, making for brisk, finely chiseled wines. Braune Kupp, on the other hand, is a warmer location on the Saar with a mix of red and gray slate. (They farm this excellent vineyard under their Le Gallais property name.) Their focus is on the fruity sweet and nobly sweet wines. I recently tasted their 2010s at the VDP presentation, in Trier, and found them most excellent. I never bought into the critique over the years that the quality really begins here at Spätlesen and above. Maybe there were some average bottlings in the past, but I’ve been impressed by their various Kabinette. Over the last several vintages, I’ve enjoyed tasting at Scharzhof. And I’ve liked mature bottles, as well, including several 1995 Scharzhofberger Kabinett. In the mid-nineties, I’ll never forget tasting with the late Egon Müller III in his library one evening a bottle from my birth year – a 1971 Scharzhofberger Kabi.

Although I agree that their prices are considerably higher than other good producers in the Mosel region, they’re pretty affordable as compared with Burgundy or Bordeaux. Mosel Riesling is underpriced. This needs to change for many grape-growers to continue to farm the steep slate slopes. It’s also important that critics – and not just David Schildknecht – make the effort to look beyond the famous names and communes.

Egon Müller is one of the few properties making Kabinett wines that don’t go over 6o or more g/l RS now. In fact, I think Egon Müller strives more for 30 g/l RS. You cannot say that for a lot of the other big-name properties, disregarding perhaps Joh. Jos. Prüm. The bitching about excessive alcohol in the dry wines is one problem, but what about excessive RS in the so-called classic sweet ones? Climate change has played a role for sure. Yet the Prädikat system, as created in 1971, is long outdated and wasn’t meant strictly for sweeter wines, rather it was based on minimum alcohol/ripeness levels for the then-EC laws.

Many drinkers don’t know that the Mosel was at its height in the late 19th century and known for its lively, low-alcohol, dry-tasting Rieslings. There were no terms such as Kabinett or even Spätlese (as it’s understood today), rather the wines were separated between chaptalized and non-chaptalized wines. The latter was labeled Naturwein (“natural wine”) or naturrein (“naturally pure”). It was a response to “unnatural” methods in the cellar, over-sugaring in particular, which was ironically more common in France than in the more northern wine regions of Germany. As with today’s natural wine movement, it was often dogmatic. Oddly, the Saar growers, with some of the coolest climes in the Mosel region, where physiological ripeness wasn’t a given, were most proud of producing unchaptalized Rieslings, including Auslesen that tasted in those days more feinherb (to use a modern tasting term for “finely dry”) than sweet.