Elegance from the Rheingau, Campania’s New Energy and a Wine Bounty From Victoria: Weekly Tasting Report (July 19-25)

We rated more than 850 wines for our latest Weekly Tasting Report, with Senior Editor Stuart Pigott out front with his yearly exploration of the new vintage in Germany. When he took his first look at the 2022s – mostly cask samples that were not rated – the negative results of the extreme summer drought were very clear in a few wines: gritty tannins and oddly jarring aromas.

But his first week of detailed and systematic tasting, devoted to the top producers in the Rheingau, including Spreitzer, Donnhoff, Schloss Johannisberg, Emrich-Schonleber, Kruger-Rumpf and others, was full of delightful surprises. Yes, here and there was a wine or two that was not quite up to scratch, but the best 2022 wines are elegant, vibrant and precise. In fact, many wines taste very cool climate with low alcohol, effusive aromas and bright acidity.

Every producer Stuart visited admitted to having been more or less skeptical about the quality during the harvest, but all were amazed that the wines turned out this way after the hot and dry months of July and August, then quite a rainy harvest period in September and October. The best 2022 German white wines impress in spite of these conditions and the challenges they created.

It’s difficult to pick out just one wine that says everything about the positive side of 2022, but the very high ratings for the super-refined Dönnhoff Riesling Nahe Dellchen GG 2022 and the much more structured and compact Dönnhoff Riesling Nahe Hermannshöhle GG 2022 speak volumes for what was possible.

“We were amazed that the mature and old vines didn’t suffer much from the drought,” Helmut Donnhoff said. The same can be said for vineyards with excellent long-term soil management, since that clearly enabled soils to retain more moisture when that really counted.

The 2022 rieslings at Schloss Johannisberg were also very exciting, and the extremely complex, impeccably balanced Schloss Johannisberg Riesling Rheingau Grünlack Spätlese 2022 proved that riesling Spatlese with unfermented grape sweetness can also shine in this vintage. “To reach these results we waited for the grapes to achieve full ripeness and accepted the loss of a significant part of the crop due to negative botrytis," estate director Stefan Doktor explained. This brave decision was amply rewarded.

In the fall of 2021, Stuart took some flack for describing the wines of the 2020 vintage –another drought year – as being “schizophrenic,” but this descriptor applies at least as much to 2022. One of the effects of climate change in Germany is that vintages are much more difficult to pigeonhole than when James and Stuart started tasting the wines in the early 1980s.

Back then it was easy to spot that, for example, 1983 was an excellent vintage and 1984 was a poor one, because the ripeness of the former was so much greater than the latter. The warming climate has abolished that marker and created a fundamentally complex situation.

A bunch of high-end German wines are now released between one and five years after the majority of wines. And there were several masterpieces in this category. The Emrich-Schönleber Riesling Nahe Halenberg R 2019 is one of the greatest dry wines of Germany’s last spectacular vintage, with staggering concentration and complexity. It is just beginning to reveal its great depths.

The Schloss Johannisberg Riesling Rheingau Goldlack Trocken 2020 is a more exceptional example of this vintage, which was often strong on fruity charm but rarely highly structured. This wine spent two and half years in oak casks, but only has a hint of perceptible oak. It has way more structure than was the norm for the vintage and is built for long-term aging. Thankfully, production was doubled with this vintage, so it no longer counts as a limited-production wine.

In Italy, James tasted about 200 wines from top producers in such regions as Abruzzo, Campania, Piedmont, Sicily, Tuscany and Veneto. Some of the most interesting wines came from Campania and a tasting at our office in Tuscany, where James met with Antonio Capaldo, the dynamic owner of Feudi di San Gregorio in the heart of Campania.

He found some of the new reds to be crunchier and more refined with an emphasis on energetic yet medium-bodied fruit instead of overextraction and tannins, particularly two single-vineyard Taurasis under the Feudi di San Gregorio label, Feudistudi Rosamilia and Feudistudi Candriano. There was also a beautiful single-vineyard fiano he tasted from Capaldo's project, Tenute Capaldo, called Goleto that was had an almost Chablis-like chalkiness from the special basalt/limestone soils where the grapes are grown.

Capaldo admitted in a conversation with James that Campania “has been late” in the move toward more drinkable and fresher wines, but he’s doing his best to change this. Senior Editor Ned Goodwin MW as well as Tastings Editor Jo Cooke were slightly underwhelmed with their Campania wine tasting earlier this year due to the “old school” nature of so many wines, which lacked freshness and were slightly heavy.

Interestingly, a few days later James tasted with owner Fabio Chiarelotto of the Suvereto-based Tuscan winery Montepeloso, and his newly bottled 2021 reds, particularly Gabbro, Eneo and Nardo, came across with crunchy energy on the palate. This highlights the new direction the winery is taking in producing more transparent and less muscular wines. “I just can’t take heavy and overmade wines,” Chiarelotto said while tasting his wines with James.

The many outstanding quality Chianti Classicos, both normal and riserva bottlings, from the 2020 and 2021 vintages should also fit into this drinkability trend.

VICTORIA'S WINE BOUNTY

Victoria offers the greatest diversity of wine style of any Australian state. While South Australia remans the motherlode of volume across quality tiers, the warm to very warm nature of most of its viticultural zones are best suited to richer styles of shiraz for those so inclined, alongside more intuitive Mediterranean varieties, particularly grenache. Victoria offers these, too, although with a more savory timbre, attesting to cooler climates, mix of geologies and the tension in the better wines. Subsequently, there is a bounty of scintillating chardonnay, increasingly good nebbiolo and some immensely complex and characterful pinot noir, if you know where to look.

Knowing where to look is the key, after all, to unlocking great wine anywhere – if you define a great wine by its irascible infrequency as well as its intrinsic qualities, ineffable beauty and strong sense of place. And one person who knows where to look is Owen Latta, the son of Eastern Peake’s founder, Norman. Owen, a rangy kid with a deft touch, turns out brilliant wines under the Eastern Peake banner and the eponymous Latta one. In essence, the former hail from the environs of Cogshill Creek, a small town near Ballarat, in western Victoria, marked by basalt over loams and nearby granitic outcrops. The latter is from intra-Victorian sourcing. While there are no added yeasts, tannins or acidity in either range, Latta is definitively more lo-fi, employing an arsenal of skin contact, creative blending, oak handling and lees work to render highly textural expressions of considerable intrigue.

The Eastern Peake Two Mile Hill Chardonnay 2021 is among the most exciting wines Senior Editor Ned Goodwin MW has tasted this year. It strikes a pose reminiscent of Ganevat, reeling off chamomile, cheesecloth and curry powder riffs, set amid dried straw and stone fruit allusions. Its Intrinsic Chardonnay 2021 sibling is just as good, if richer. Yet these are wines of a sleek and mineral disposition. If looking for bumptious, older-school styles, look away!

Eastern Peake's Intrinsic Pinot Noir 2021 is a gravely roll across a mid-weighted palate flecked with griotte and bergamot. Owen Latta said of it: ‘When I was assembling the Intrinsic Pinot Noir together for its journey to bottle, I thought it was looking pretty special – one for the ages. It definitely feels to me like it’ll go down as one of the great vintages of EP Pinot Noir. I can't wait to see how it cellars in the long term."

Also from the Latta range, check out the Moonambel Quartz Bianco G & J Mullens Sauvignon Blanc 2022 – an ode to Pascal Cotat, with pungent interludes of skin contact.

Meanwhile, in the granitic turf of sub-alpine Beechworth, Peter Graham crafts aromatic shiraz, classy chardonnay and a nebbiolo that is the best thing outside of the Langhe, at Domenica. He, too, knows where to look!

In our Hong Kong office, we’ve started tasting Austrian wines, mostly from the latest 2022 and 2021 vintages. There are plenty of fantastic whites made from gruner veltliner in Niederosterreich: check out those from Birgit Eichinger, F.X. Pichler, Turk and Johann Donabaum, alongisde a lusciously creamy chardonnay from Ebner-Ebenauer. From the Sudsteiermark further south, we liked a peppery, saline expression of sauvignon blanc from Tement, and a smoky and spicy welschriesling from Gross.

But what impressed Associate Editor Claire Nesbitt the most this week was a 2021 riesling, produced by the family winery Proidl in Seftenberg along the Krems river in Niederosterreich. The Generation X 2021 is deep and concentrated, showing intense notes of citrus, herbs, rock salt and white pepper spice. It’s closed by screw cap like many wines from Austria and will likely hold and develop further complexity for a long time to come.

– Stuart Pigott, James Suckling, Ned Goodwin MW and Claire Nesbitt contributed reporting.

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.

Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.