Thanks Martin, but that’s not necessary. I wasn’t offended that he was sitting there alone at his computer on a Saturday night thinking about me touching myself. I mean, it’s creepy, but also a little flattering. I know him from his retail days and he’s not really the kind of person that is going to get a rise out of me.
Alex
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Hi William,
We’re definitely in alignment on much of this. Your assessment on Coche is spot on. When young, the “matchstick” tends to be more dominant. Which is one of the reasons I feel it’s a combination of reduction and molecular sulfur. And in my opinion, there is always plenty of fruit and minerality behind the matchstick notes.
With time that matchstick integrates, and leaves some of the best examples of Chardonnay in the world. There should be no confusion that I think the Coche wines are tremendous.
In the Jura, while sulfite use in the cellar may be lower, many of my favorite producers are farming organically. Molecular sulfur is still the backbone of many organic spray programs(we use sulfur until set and then attempt to switch to alternative organic choices. Sometimes Mother Nature requires us to go back to a sulfur pass later in the growing cycle and it generally shows up in the cellar as volatile sulfur compounds during fermentation and elevage-in my opinion.
That said, I really enjoy both Ganevat and Tissot, and while I have occasionally seen reduction in Tissot, I have not seen the struck match aspect. (Maybe 50-60 experiences between the two producers, so not a wide range of sampling at all).
Fair enough response. I appreciate that this post clarifies anything that I might have mis-interpeted then. “Fan boys” was un-necessary on my part and I should have chosen other words.
I’m not sure about the Instagram aspect, as there wasn’t an intention my part to call out virtue signalling with wine purchases. I follow Charlie Fu on IG and don’t see anything wrong with someone sharing shots of wines for whatever reason. If that came across, it wasn’t intended.
I also don’t begrudge Keller their pricing or people buying Keller at those prices. Quite the opposite. Compared to Burgundy or Bordeaux, Germany has had little in the way of the “super-recognition” and whether it’s Keller or Donnhoff, I am happy about it as it will drag along lots of other producers too.
+1
sure are a lot of defensive / offensive posts about grape juice…
True but through it all we actually had a pretty good thread. If the snapping was offensive to some, my apologies. That said, my ego isn’t very fragile and I didn’t take Alex that way either. He said what he felt, and I respect that. And when you do it in real time, there are bound to be crossed wires.
It’s a good view into the different ways we all view our favorites and had input from a lot of posters I really enjoy seeing put their fingers on the keyboard.
Cool, thanks. Appreciate the response. I agree on Germany. Most of my cellar is German wines that I likely couldn’t give away if I tried. The Keller feels like a strange outlier. I sure wish I didn’t love it so much. It’s just a matter of time before I’m priced out so until I am I’m backfilling on whatever I can afford.
A
You were not one of the people I was referring to. You helped rescue the thread from the muck it was threatening to descend into and did indeed make it interesting.
You seem quite threatened by other points of view.
Excellent advice.
Definitely. There are tons of points of view out there that I find extremely threatening and terribly harmful. None of them relate to wine, however. Wine for me is all about personal preference, totally non-threatening and allows room for multitudes, as you can see from my post that quoted above.
Alex
Totally agree with this. Moore Bros, the New York importer, typically as the VdF at a good price. At a slightly higher price point, they carry Keller’s RR (roughly $50), which has a little bit of residual sugar but for me is similar quality-wise to the GGs. I thought the RR out-performed in 2018. Note that Moore Bros actually carry’s the GG’s as well at what are generally decent prices, although the 2018 vintage hit $100 for the first time from there (Kirschpiel and Hubacker). I’m sure they bring in everything and I believe most of it goes to restaurants, but given the state of the world I suppose it is possible that there is more 2019 available at retail.
A
I hear that. I wish I had done a lot more backfilling on a number of my favorite producers that have appreciated in price beyond what I can spend. Many of them coincided with starting the winery, and I’m stuck without any representation. Which may explain some of my reaction on the thread.
OP posed a legitimate and interesting question which has puzzled me as well, not sure why everybody’s jumping on his back. Keller has had a culty aura for a long time but the price has exploded only recently. When this sort of thing happens, there’s something driving it other than “they’re just THAT great!”
Naturally you can’t have market pricing like this without a population of people paying the price, and it’s not terribly easy to question what the heck they’re thinking in doing so without the subtextual implication that they’re slaves to fashion or just boring ol’ conspicuous consumers, but the floor is still open for alternative explanations. “They’re worth the price!” is only a persuasive explanation from those who were backing up the truck on caseloads and caseloads of the stuff when they sold for a fraction of the current price, and it still doesn’t account for why the pop is so recent.
Keller used to make regular appearances on the blind tasting circuit when I got out more. They were generally good, but never struck me as particularly distinguishable from any other GG either in terms of quality or character. Even then it was understood you were supposed to ooh and aah at the Keller, but they were just a bit more expensive than the norm, certainly nowhere near the current order of magnitude.
I’m with David, there’s a long list of Austrians I’d rather drink. It’s true the style is generally different from the German GG style. To me the difference is in terms of being vastly more interesting, delicious, and less liable to be designed specifically for strip-mining the enamel off your teeth. Alzinger Steinertal and Pichler Kellerberg are pretty good mental pegs for me for figuring out whether any dry riesling is worth the money. If you’re trying to sell me riesling at 2x, 4x, or 10x the price of those,
I do find it funny when you try to “introduce” me to wines. What makes you think I haven’t already tried most of the things you would recommend?
Sorry if you were offended. The answer to your question is your post number 12, where you said you “pretty much stopped” with German GGs when they became pricier than Austrians. There are only 3 vintages of the S-L doktor, and I think there have been 4 of the Wehlener (Russell Faulkner will know for sure if he is reading this), and at least the former is about as pricey as you can get for a Mosel GG. So it seemed like a fairly reasonable presumption that since you stopped drinking that category of wines and these two members of the category had only become available very recently and are very pricey, you hadn’t tried these. Cheers David!
Agree that your posts were not what I meant either. I think ur posts were mostly reasoned opinions.
I do think there are a lot of good info in this thread But damn if the tone isn’t just so typical of Internet forums.
Imagine the group sitting around a table having wine. Or even on a zoom call. Would the tone be nearly as negative as some on the thread have made it?
Hi Marcus - thanks for your kind words and thoughtful comments. I think we agree as to quality of Keller wines overall and are on much the same page philosophically as well. The question of whether Keller wines are a good value is a trickier one. Value is extremely hard to quantify or substantiate. I do think the Keller von der Fels is still an excellent value, as Martin and others have said, in that any score for quality I would give it would be as high as a great many pricier bottles in the dry Riesling category, and higher than most in its same price range. I believe that’s a better template for value than the Sacred Cow comparison you rightly referenced above.
Whether the GGs are a good value is a much bigger leap. I think I’d have to say no, given how high the general quality of German Riesling is (in my opinion, there are oceans of good to great German Riesling out there these days), and how generally low prices are in the region across the board. To me, though, in this case, it doesn’t matter that much. Value is always a consideration for me as I translate wines-I-want into wines-I-choose-to-buy, and it’s certainly a characteristic I appreciate in some of the wines I love and buy yearly. But it’s almost never the driving factor in my purchasing decisions, except maybe when I’m choosing between two wines I like equally.
Not everything in my cellar is a great value, I admit. Value at some point gives way to another one of those wriggly concepts, namely “worth it.” I think that the phrase “worth it” is meaningless unless the words “to me” follow it, so I’ll say that the GGs are still worth it to me at release prices. I love them. Some of that is emotional history - my husband and I have being buying them since way before the prices soared, and, of course, a big part of me selfishly wishes that they had never become so popular. Fortunately, quality at Keller has only gone up as well, in my opinion, as the family pour their hearts, souls and sweat into constant improvement, thoughtful wine making, and endless backbreaking labor in the vineyards. There’s no resting on laurels there.
Someday, sadly, if prices continue to climb, “worth it” will drop away just as “good value” did, and the Keller GGs will go the way of Rousseau and Roumier and Raveneau for me. I’ll continue to scrabble after them until that happens and, if it does, there are those oceans of other great Rieslings out there to keep me happy.
Cheers! 
Egon Müller has already gone to crazy land, with $75-$100 Kabinett, and upwards from there. It just does not have the qualitative gap over other great M-S-R Rieslings (the old designation is intentional there).
Keller has certainly found an audience, and that leads to higher prices.
Overall I am at a point where I am finally sick of price escalation, and unable to find enjoyment in bottles that have increased in value beyond what I see in them. That probably colors my input in this thread a great deal, and is turning me away from most wine, except where I feel some connection to the winery/winemaker. I wouldn’t know Keller (the man) from a hole in the wall, and since the wines don’t ring my chimes I see little sense in the pricing. They’re just a liquid version of really expensive shoes to me.
This to me is a great thread just for the sociologic aspects of wine consumerism. I have no stick in this fire: I have never, thankfully, been bitten by the German or Austrian riesling bug. I have some in my cellar and I like them. The proverbial light bulb neurotransmitter never got tripped in my noggin and being a man of finite means I am thankful as I have enough economically indulgent vices as it is. So the entertaining part for me is just to read the viewpoints with a totally detached point of view.
So let us revisit. A new poster flames out in what seems to be a reflection of our stressful times. To be pissed off at being priced out of a wine someone loves is pretty much universal in this passion we call wine enthusiasm. As wise people have been know to say, there is an awful lot of fermented grape juice available on this planet.
In the meantime I learned that a gourmet cook I follow has a wealth of knowledge on the subject as does a winemaker I admire as does a regular I admire (Sarah) and all the while I am able to say to myself “thank God I am not bitten by THAT bug”. Fwiw, I say the same thing to myself about Calif cult cabs, SQN, DRC, Dujac, and the list goes on.
In the N.Y. market, the Keller importer is Moore Bros. The wines mainly used to be sold through their N.Y. store although of course you could get them at crush and other places, but German wine is more of a niche and they didn’t pop up everywhere. You could walk into Moore Bros and ask for the Kellerkiste. Up until late 2018, you could walk into Moore Bros and buy back-vintage Keller at release prices. As late as September 2018, they still had mags of 2012 GG there for release price. As the wines started to gain in popularity, my sense is that Moore Bros began selling most of the Keller GG to restaurants, leaving some for retail but not nearly as much. That’s a sensible decision if restaurants are also buying 50 cases of daily drinkers, but it makes it harder for individuals to buy the wines at release. So then you get secondary market sellers testing the maximum price. That takes a few vintages to find the upper price limit, but someone will get there eventually. Based on zachys prices for the 2018s ($300 for hubacker/kirchspiel, $500 for Absterde) and the speed at which they sold, it seems like the price has room to climb.
Of course, NYC doesn’t make the market, but once you have proof that you can move something for a price 3x of what you’ve been selling it, you are going to find a lot of people increasing their price. My sense is that at this point almost all of the GGs that Moore Bros brings in has been going to restaurants rather than retail and that the number of bottles coming to individual consumers through official import channels is relatively small.