I did dinner last night with a couple of friends at NYC BYOB thai restaurant, Pure Thai. We toted along a couple of great Gewurz and Riesling to go with the food (which I’d highly recommend!), when we stumbled upon something really interesting.
We pulled the cork on one of the wines I’d brought, an '05 Markus Molitor Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Spatlese, only to realize that the cork told an entirely different story… reading “Auslese”
…and then I realized the year on the cork was '06, not '05 like the label read.
My pictures aren’t exactly worthy of framing, with the dim lighting and cell phone as a camera, but I think you get the idea. Based on the wine, I think it was probably the '05 Spatlese, but I can’t be sure. It was a riper styled wine with hints of honeyed botrytis and some petrol notes coming through that I’d more often associate w/ Auslese.
To make things even more confusing, even their website describes Molitor Spatleses with the following: “most of our Spätlese wines could legally be declared as Auslese wines, and many of the must weights are at the upper end of that required for Auslese”.
Can anyone offer up any insight into what happened here? Has anyone ever seen something like this, outside of counterfeit wines (which I highly doubt happened here).
Maybe I’ll never know exactly what we were drinking, but it sure was tasty with the thai!
Never ran into such a mismatch between cork and bottle label with a German wine. Interesting, unless you inadvertently mixed up corks after opening. Was the original capsule intact before opening? Short of the mixup it seems likely that a different year cork got into the wrong year wine bin at the winery. It is a not uncommon claim among German estates that their Spatlese level is at an Auslese level, or nearly so. I remember that the Albert brothers estate in the Rheigau (I think in Johannisberg) when I visited in the late 70s opened some bottles for me that were pretty convincing of being a Pradikat level higher, (BA instead of the labeled Auslese). I still have a few bottles of the sublime Adam Albert BA wines I brought over from Germany at the time. BTW who was the US importer of the Molitor?
My guess would be that the cork was correct. German wines are typically in bottle by the late Spring/early Summer following the vintage, so I would doubt that there were '06 corks lying around yet. And labeling takes place after bottling, sometimes well after. I would bet on a labeling error, and probably that there’s a whole batch out there like this.
Good rational about the wine actually being an '06 Auslese, given that the '06 corks likely wouldn’t be at the winery until after the '05s were sealed. I’m more curious than anything else. I only bought the single bottle and the wine showed really well. I’m thinking about emailing the importer to see if they can give any insight.
Shot a quick email to the importer and they’re confident it was the Spatlese… a quick snippet from their response:
“I checked our stocks and the delivery to the US and we are sure, the wine you drunk was a 2005 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Spätlese. But it happens, truth the construction of the bottling machine, that single corks are left in the cork hopper, in a small niche on the side, and that they are coming back in the system, truth vibrations. Markus told as well that not the total production of the 2005 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr was bottled in 2006, so it really could be, that the 2006 cork came in the bottle because of a left over in 2006/07.”
