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Viinin Kuvailu
The Story
Currently the top grand cru riesling amongst the four Grosses Gewächs is from the fifty year-old vines in the half a hectare parcel that the Kellers own in Morstein proper. The soils here are all a chalky marl, with Burgundy-like grey-blue clay pummeled with limestone pebbles and scree. These old vines produce a very deep, powerful and structured riesling that shares more in common with the Trimbachs’ Clos Ste. Hune than it does with their Cuvée Frédéric Émile, and is currently one of the two most highly sought after Keller wines in the cellar. It is always a very slow wine to unfold, and the glorious 2006 will not be released until the spring of 2008. With the old vines and yields of under thirty-five hectoliters per hectare, Klaus-Peter only produces a thousand bottles of this great wine every year, and consequently it is a rare and difficult bottle to find. But it is definitely worth a concerted search, as it often couples a bit more power and ripeness than found in the AbtsE with the seamless and impeccable balance of a very minerally-defined riesling.
While Klaus-Peter’s father made outstanding wines from the Morstein prior to 2001, it is really only since 2001 that this wine has really jumped into the very top energy level of dry Rieslings, and there are very, very few that I can think of that possess the same great potential for longevity and continued brilliance in the bottle as current releases of the Keller Morstein. I would tend to not touch a bottle for at least six or seven years after the vintage date, and most likely, the wines will prove still to be too young at that age to really be hitting their apogees. It would not surprise me in the least to see this wine age along the lines of Clos Ste. Hune, but of course with only five vintage under Klaus-Peter’s belt, it is obviously premature to be making meaningful comparisons with that legendary dry riesling, but this is clearly the league that Klaus-Peter is aiming for with his Morstein.
Weingut Keller under Klaus-Peter’s direction has become famous for its dry rieslings from its grand crus, or Grosses Gewächs, vineyards in the towns of Westhofen and Dalsheim. To date there are four distinct Keller vineyards that are entitled to Grosses Gewächs status for dry riesling: the Hubacker from Dalsheim, and the Kirchspiel, AbtsE and Morstein vineyards in Westhofen. However, not all of sections of these vineyards are awarded grand cru status, and consequently it is only the riesling from the top sections of these gentle slopes, with their less fertile soils, that are allowed to be bottled as Grosses Gewächs.
Klaus-Peter estimates that only twenty percent of the production from the family’s holdings in these four vineyards make it into the grand cru bottlings in any given vintage, with the other sections going into the non- grand cru riesling bottlings such as the “Von der Fels” bottling (which literally means, from the rocks), which is an outstanding dry bottling from the lower sections of these vineyards that lie on limestone soils, or the dry “Riesling R.R.” from a section of terres rouges in the lower section of the Kirchspiel vineyard. In addition, the estate continues to make some classic, off-dry wines from some of these same vineyards, and again these are typically made from the lower sections of the slopes which are a bit more prone to botrytis. As Klaus-Peter observes, “we are happy to have botrytis in our vineyards for our off-dry wines, but for the dry rieslings my goal is for very little, or better yet, no botrytis-affected grapes to find their way into these selections.”