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Wine Description
The Story
“G-Max”. The G is named for his great grandfather, George, and Max, who is the younger of Klaus-Peter’s two sons (his older son also has a special bottling named for him, Klaus-Peter’s top pinot noir). The vines for the G-Max bottling are all extremely old, and from which vineyard they hail from is no longer made public. Klaus-Peter may well make it from a different parcel of old vines in each vintage, probably at the very top of one of the slopes, depending on which parcel has excelled the most in any given year, but he is no longer at liberty to say from which vineyard he has made the wine. The reason for this is the year that the G-Max was made from the oldest parcel in Morstein, Klaus-Peter (who then saw no reason to keep this information private), told all of his visitors where he had sourced the grapes from for the G-Max, only to find one of his enthusiastic Japanese fans in the Morstein vineyard soon after cutting grapes from this parcel to take home as a souvenir!
Needless to say the riesling G-Max is of a sufficiently exhilarating quality to make fans go to extremes, and now Klaus-Peter keeps his decision on which vineyard’s oldest vines will supply the G-Max in each vintage a secret, in the hopes that he will not loose half of the potential harvest of the following year to souvenir hunters. Because it does not state which vineyard it hails from on the label, it is not entitled to Grosses Gewächs status, but this does not tend to deter any of its many enthusiasts. The G-Max is Klaus- Peter’s most famous wine in Germany (and is the wine that really put the estate on the map after 2001 for their profound dry rieslings), and it is priced at levels similar to Clos Ste. Hune due to its scarcity and extremely high demand. It is indeed a hauntingly brilliant wine, but to my palate it is only a very small step up in quality from all of the other great grand cru Keller rieslings. I expect that one day a significant percentage of this particular wine will be sold off at auction, as this seems a logical venue for a wine which is so highly sought after and made in such limited quantity. I would of course be very pleased to have a handful of bottles of G-Max in my own cellar, but am very much content to have a good representation of the other four riesling Grosses Gewächs instead. For all five of these grand cru rieslings are as good as dry riesling gets, with only a couple of examples the world over that can compete with these utterly profound wines.
Vintage 2007
Germany Vintage Report 2007 / The phenomena of climate change and the resulting global warming also affected the year 2007. Once again, meteorological observations made it possible to establish record data: after a winter that was clearly too mild, the Spring weather in April and May was extremely warm. Additionally, although summer was often not very "summer", temperatures recorded during the growing season were the highest since record keeping began (1884), even breaking the record set in 2003.
Naturally, these climatic conditions had a considerable impact on the vines. A very hot April led to an extremely early explosion. Warm temperatures continued into May, so the vines flowered during the second half of the month – the earliest flowering since time immemorial. The heat lasted until early June and by mid-June the vegetation was more than three weeks ahead of schedule. The rather average weather during the rest of the summer reduced this lead. Nevertheless, the grapes began to ripen in the Rheingau on August 3 – precisely from the “record year” 2003. The difference is that the development of the grapes (after early flowering) continued more slowly and evenly , thanks to a better distribution of sunshine and precipitation than in 2003.
Due to this perfect weather regime, the vines had an optimal supply of water and nutrients, and despite the relatively early harvest (due to early flowering), the Riesling grapes could remain on the vines for a long time – an important factor for this grape variety.
Even the earliest harvested grapes had exceptionally high extract values (even higher than in 2005 and 2006) and showed perfect physiological maturity and well-developed aromas. As such, the early harvest yielded fine Kabinett and light Spätlese qualities which will be bottled as Qualitätswein (Gutsriesling).
Overall, ideal weather conditions allowed us to smoothly extend the harvest over seven weeks and selectively harvest the best grapes for the other Prädikat wines. For the 19th year in a row, we were able to harvest all Prädikat, including Trockenbeerenauslese with up to 256 degrees Oechsle, at our Grand Cru sites Kiedricher Gräfenberg and Kiedricher Turmberg.
In addition to the exceptionally high quality of the 2007 vintage, the wonderful climatic conditions of the year allowed us to obtain a higher yield. After five short years, this brings us back to our long-term average.
