AP # 005 15. Pop and pour. This was the second BA they made (after 1976), and they made a whole Fuder of it. NB - there was a ring of tartrates at the bottom of the bottle. Orange-gold. Classical aromas here - saffron-botrytis, super-ripe red skinned peach, lots of delicate flowery honey (orange flower, bergamot?) Really fine texture, silky and rounded and not overly sweet, with some spice in the midpalate. Long on the finish, with flowers and peach syrup.
This is a great example of the Merkelbach house style. Itās drinkable and delicious and not overly sweet or ripe for its pradikat. I donāt think itāll live forever, but surely into the late 30s.
I think the best word would be anachronistic. They made wine from Urzig and Kinheim for just about 70 years. They knew those sites back when the Mosel gave you a decent vintage two or three times a decade. They never chased high must weights or severe selections to win points, but chose to make wines that were modestly in their pradikat in every vintage.
The wines are also drier tasting and less concentrated than their peers. For example, that BA was picked at 137 Oechsle and fermented down to 10% alcohol. But the vintage was such that they made 1200 liters of it!
Theyāre one of my favorite producers in that part of the world and Iām very happy the Selbachs are helping out now that the brothers have got to be in their 80s.
Perhaps āold schoolā rather than anachronistic? In fact some of the things they never stopped doing (e.g., block picking) have come back in fashion (see the Selbach Rotlay & Schmitt bottlings).
Also worth noting that the Selbachs have taken over now. Itās no longer just helping. That said they are trying to work in the same way the brothers did.
That 2010 BA is an amazing, drinkable BA, as opposed to it being strictly a dessert-style wine.
You know, itās my secret hope that we might see some Merkelbach parcel wines in the vein of Rotlay, Anrecht or Schmitt. Itād be a nice way to close the circle I think. And while Iāll grant you that some of their methods have recently come back into vogue, I donāt think many producers imitate them stylistically.
Iāve got a couple of vintages of Urgluck and really like it. Did they make it every year? I seem to remember that sometimes it was Spatlese and sometimes Auslese.
Itās not really a question of whether they made it. They always did block picking. āItā existed even it is wasnāt labeled as such. If you have not read (or recently read) the dedication in Terry Theiseās 2012 vintage catalog (which is the 2013 catalog) you should, as it gives the info that I think you are looking for. Perhaps not to the detail of how do I find this or that bottling, but more to the point of they are all this or that bottling.
I was going through my stack of Terry catalogs and you know, I was wrong about the ā2 vintages of BAā in my original note - Terry said that was the case in the 2010 catalog, but in 2006 they made 5 cases of Wurzgarten BAā¦ you wonder who has it all?
Iād have to go trolling through MFW to pull AP numbers, but if I remember correctly they werenāt consistent in assigning AP numbers to wines so that you could tell if a particular wine came solely from Urgluck or not without the added name on the label.
As for en-bloc harvests, Hofgut Falkenstein has always done it this way. Itās not such a rarity. The only exception is if a problematic vintage requires a so-called negative selection beforehand. But thatās very rare. Otherwise, we just cut those grape bunches deemed unsatisfactory to the ground or leave them hanging on the vine while we make a single pass through the vineyard. The blocks that Selbach-Oster harvests all at once, such as Schmitt or Rotlay, are picked late with some botrytis and usually have Auslese must weights.