Mosel Madness, Divine and Otherwise: Weekly Tasting Report (Aug 31-Sept 6)

We rated 805 wines from nine different countries over the past week, uncorking some truly astounding bottles from the Mosel and finishing off our tastings of Greek wines, including some of the top bottles in the country, which we covered in our annual report.

Look at the slew of very high scores for 2021 rieslings from the Mosel below and you’ll almost certainly think this is an amazing vintage for the region, and with one of those masterpieces of aromatic and mineral brilliance in your glass you would be right.

Nobody is happier with the results than Oliver Haag of the Fritz Haag estate in Brauneberg, on the Middle Mosel. Senior Editor Stuart Pigott showered his naturally sweet riesling Spatlese, Auslese, BA and TBA wines from the Juffer and Juffer-Sonnenuhr sites with very high scores, including two perfect 100s.

“When we started the harvest I thought, oh no! It really didn’t look good.” Haag said. “But at the end of the harvest I said, ‘Oh, wow!’ “

“In 2021 in Germany the yields are always well down on the long-term average,” Stuart said. “And for some of the best wines they are way down! That’s how they got the incredible ripeness at the end of the harvest.”

However, there’s a lot more to the wines that Stuart tasted over the past week in the Mosel than just these spectacular ratings. The first caveat is often supplied by the words “limited production” or “very limited production” at the end of the tasting note. This applies to Fritz Haag, too.

Extreme examples of this are the riesling Kabinett wines from Julian Haart,  which are only available in a six-bottle “Kabinett Case,” of which less than a thousand were sold. It is already a collectors item.

They include the Julian Haart Riesling Mosel Ohligsberg Kabinett (White Label) 2021, which perfectly combines the lightness typical for the category with an almost absurd concentration for a wine with well below 10 percent alcohol.

It is only the most amazing Mosel Riesling Kabinett from a year that was ideal for the category. “It’s a Kabinett vintage with the acidity you had in the wines of the 1970s and 1980s, but with a structure those wines didn’t have,” Julian Haart said.

The other caveat to 2021 is a bunch of wines from well-known producers with sub-90 scores, which is not compatible with a “great vintage” in the usual sense. 2019 was a great vintage in Germany not just because of some rare top bottlings, but also because the regular wines from good producers were often stunning

“I only visited the top producers, but even there at the bottom end of the range the negative side of the 2021 vintage sometimes shows its face,” Stuart said. “It’s most obvious in basic wine made from wholly or partly bought-in fruit.”

READ MORE: THE UNIQUE EXPRESSIVENESS OF GERMANY’S MIDDLE MOSEL

The cause of the under-ripeness and slightly wishy-washy flavors that characterize the disappointing 2021 German wines was the first half of the summer, when heavy rainfall and fairly warm temperatures resulted in a lot of downy mildew. After the rain stopped, powdery mildew also developed in some places.

“Contrary to popular belief, not all German vineyards are planted on stony soils,” Stuart said. “In late August 2021 in various regions, I remember seeing vineyards planted on heavy soils that a combination of the two mildews had devastated.”

This is the reason we strongly advise that you not blindly buy 2021 vintage German wines. And the crucial thing to understand about the 2021 vintage rieslings from the Mosel and the rest of Germany is that due to the extreme weather pattern of the growing season they tend to have a high acidity content. The first question when tasting each of the wines in the week's tasting report was always if the acidity was a bug or a feature. That is, did it make the wine come over as tart and angular, or did it give the wine an exciting brilliance? In a few instances an odd lack of acidity made the wine taste weak.

NEW CLASSICS OF RIOJA

On the other side of the world in our Hong Kong tasting office, we had a stunning tasting of Artadi wines – the new classics of Rioja that are such a departure from the old, “traditional” image of Rioja with its light but coconutty and vanilla-scented wines that came with the opening of the export market 50 years ago and turned the region’s focus from quality to quantity.

Artadi’s current wines are anything but light and coconutty. The winery walked away from the Consejo Regulador of Rioja DOCa in 2015 and has since labeled its wines under its own terms, showing the appellation of Alava on the label in place of Rioja. (The names of villages, vineyards and plots can now be used on labels instead of the old Crianza, Reserva or Gran Reserva.)

Artadi’s style could be considered modern, but “new classic” is a better term for its singular tempranillos, which come with deep color, compact fresh fruit and powerful yet fine structure. Each vineyard or plot shows its unique expression from a single vintage.

READ MORE: TOP 100 WINES OF SPAIN 2021

Artadi’s 2019 vintage in general shows even more density and concentration, but such density resulted from the vineyard and the vintage thanks to its powerful yet chalky tannins – which didn’t come about in an extracted way. For most of the 2019s, the oak spices are still present, but they remain ornate and delicate, and will fully integrate with the fruit in a few years.

While the quantity of the ultra-fine tannins suggests that these single-village and single-plot wines of Artadi deserve long-time aging in the cellar, the harmony with glossy fruit and the mineral allure make some of them already quite enjoyable at such an early stage, something that winemaker and owner Carlos Lopez de Lacalle always wants to find in his wines.

One of the best and the most stunning Artadi bottlings that can be enjoyed either now or much later is the Viña El Pisón Alava 2019.

Coming from a 2.4- hectare vineyard, it already shows well-rounded complexity with concentration, mineral elegance and fluidity. The Artadi Alava El Carretil 2019 is another one that stands out with its well-rounded complexity and harmony. It comes from a 5.6-hectare plot rich in limestone clay, delivering a tense tempranillo with chalky tannins and showing incredible depth and mineral finesse. While it is already great, we believe it will shine with a few more years of aging in the bottle, during which the tannins will soften even more.

While some of Artadi’s single-vineyard and single-plot wines also offer great value for money, the real bargains from Artadi are its village wine, the Viña de Gain, as well as the exceptional garnachas from its Navarra project, Artazu, and the monastrell wine from its Alicante project, El Seque. We found the Artazu most impressive among them.

Garnachas like the Artazu Garnacha Navarra Pasos de San Martín 2018 should be on your smart-buy and must-buy lists. Tangy and honest with a Mediterranean character, it is a juicy and almost ethereal expression with racy red fruit that might make garnacha lovers finish the whole bottle.

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor; Zekun Shuai, Senior Editor

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.