Purity and Zest from Napa and Sonoma, Germany’s Burgundian Side and China’s Rising Stars: Weekly Tasting Report (Nov 9-15)

“When you saw the clusters, you knew it was going to be a great vintage,” said Carlo Mondavi, the owner of Raen, one of the top wineries making beautiful pinot noir and chardonnay from the West Sonoma Coast AVA. Mondavi was speaking about the range of wines from his most recent release, 2021, during a tasting at his house in Napa a couple of weeks ago. 

“We have friends that say it was their best vintage, and it is one of our best vintages yet,” he added. “It has some the richness of 2019 and 2017 and the elegance of 2018 and 2016.” 

Mark Aubert of Aubert Wines had similar praise for 2021 during a tasting at his winery near Calistoga a few days before: “We had no heat wave at all in 2021. Coming after 2020, it was easy. 2020 was rough.”

The recent releases of Aubert and Raen lead the pack in this week’s tasting report with some fantastic chardonnays and pinot noirs. And the wines are very different in personality. Aubert is made in a straightforward way with soft pump-overs during fermentation and macerations to emphasize the unadulterated beauty and ripeness of their grapes from Napa and Sonoma, while Raen uses whole clusters of grapes in their winemaking to give the wines some lift and zest. They are very different when you taste them, but their wines are equally compelling. Check out the tasting notes and ratings. 

Meanwhile, I finally tasted the new vintage of Grace Family Vineyards from Napa Valley, which is one of my favorite wines from the region even though they only make about 150 cases. It’s a compact and structured Grace with fantastic depth and toned muscles. The new owners of Grace, Kate and Jeremy Green, believe the wine maintains the character of past offerings from the tiny winery, yet it is purer and more focused. Winemaker Helen Kiplinger likes the fruitier, brighter notion of the 2019 compared with the 2018, which was more tannic and powerful. I rated the 2019 99 points and the 2018 100. 

READ MORE: TOP 100 WINES OF THE WORLD 2022 AND OUR WINE OF THE YEAR

I also visited the superb vineyard project of the Greens, an amphitheater-like vineyard in the hills west of St. Helena off of White Sulphur Spring Road. This could be one of the most exciting new vineyard and winemaking projects in Napa for the next five years. Stay tuned for more but try to get a bottle of Reliquus Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley St. Helena 2018 (rated below) to get an idea of the quality potential. It’s sold in a few restaurants in the valley. 

There are also some terrific new releases from the mountain wineries of Outpost and True, with pure and structured 2019 reds on Howell Mountain. New releases from NBA superstar Stephen Curry and his family, Domaine Curry, are also below His blend of mostly cabernet franc with the rest cabernet sauvignon, merlot and petit verdot is a delicious bottle and new to the market. Plus, it costs around $75. 

I also want to point out the wonderful selection of wines rated here from Hans Herzog and his wife, Theresa, in the Marlborough region of New Zealand. The Swiss couple make wonderful handmade reds and whites from an array of grapes, from viognier to nebbiolo. In fact, the barrel of nebbiolo they make is like something from the best of Barolo. Unfortunately, they are tiny production. Check out all the ratings from my cellar visit in October.

GERMANY'S BURGUNDIAN SIDE

Senior Editor Stuart Pigott just completed tasting for our Austria Report 2022 and also rated some late-released German wines that will be added to our just published annual report on that country. In both cases, they were mostly wines from the last vintage, 2021.

“When James Suckling and I started tasting professionally 40 years ago, Germany was all wines from the previous vintage, but since about a decade ago wines bottled after between one and two years in cask became a serious category,” Stuart explained. “That created some entirely new wine styles, and the excitement last week is all about them.”

None were more spectacular than the near perfect Immich-Batterieberg Riesling Mosel Batterieberg Réserve 2020 and Immich-Batterieberg Riesling Mosel Zollturm 2020.

“Immich-Batterieberg is a historic estate that I first visited in 1989,” Stuart said. “The wines were always very distinctive, and they only got more so during the last years under winemaker and director Gernot Kollmann. These are radically contrasting wines, although they grew less than one kilometer apart on steep slopes on the right back of the Mosel Valley and were both matured in small oak casks for almost two years.”

Hard as it may be to believe, you could easily mistake the Batterieberg Réserve 2020 for a great Burgundian chardonnay with the enormous concentration and amazing mouthfeel we associate with those wines! “That never happened before, and I can’t explain it,” Kollmann told Stuart. Production was very limited at 400 bottles.

There are a thousand more bottles of the Zollturm 2020, which fermented for two whole years. “It makes me think of the great Mosel Auslese wines made before modern cellar technology started arriving in the late 1940s,” Stuart observed. “Before then, Auslese wines were barely off-dry but had enormous concentration. This wine should age well for decades.”

Of course, many French wines undergo long barrel maturation, or what winemakers there call “elevage,” or “upbringing.” For example, Burgundian chardonnays usually come onto the market at about two years of age.

Chardonnay has been grown experimentally in Germany since the late 1980s, and finally some great wines are being made from this grape, like the Aldinger Chardonnay Württemberg Untertürkheimer Giüs EL 2020. It has a breathtaking interplay of candied citrus, chalky minerality and super-elegant acidity.

Winemaker Matthias Aldinger of Fellbach/Württemberg, showed a long row of late-released wines that wowed Stuart, including the amazing, sparkling Aldinger Sekt Württemberg Brut Nature 2015. With its spectacular array of candied fruits and brioche it tastes like a prestige cuvee champagne.

“No wonder,” Stuart said. “It’s made from the same trio of grape varieties – chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier – and they are grown on a chalky soil, just like in Champagne. The difference is that at the bottom of the hill is the Mercedes Benz factory!”

CONSISTENT QUALITY FROM CHINA

Meanwhile, Senior Editor Zekun Shuai has returned to Beijing and is reviewing Chinese wines. The highlights of his first week of tastings came from Ningxia and Shandong, where a few producers are delivering consistent quality from challenging vintages.

One of them is Chateau Rong Yuan Mei in Ningxia, which had to battle to get 2020 in bottle after a sterling 2019. A frost in late April 2020, the worst in the last 20 years, cut production by half, according to Deng Zhongxiang, a French-trained winemaker who honed his skills in Burgundy and who now consults for six wineries in Ningxia, including Rong Yuan Mei. Old vines suffered more from the frost but further concentrated the fruit intensity, while heavy rain in August also affected the wine quality in 2020, diluting some wines, according to Liu Jianjun, an independent winemaker who didn’t make any reds in 2020.

The youthful and floral Chateau Rong Yuan Mei Syrah Ningxia Hong Fan Yin 容园美酒庄西拉 2020 is a fine example of a 2020 wine that flourished, delivering excellent concentration with proper structure and fine tannins. And the Chateau H.Y.R.H Malbec Ningxia Mountain Wave 海悦仁和酒庄一山一水珍藏马尔贝克2020 from the Jinshan area of Yinchuan is a malbec that Deng consulted on and helped with in the blending. Although it has been dialed back from the previous vintage, it shows a fruity, herbal freshness with a fine, mineral edge.

Deng says that Ningxia’s malbec tends to be different from Cahors and Argentina, which is not as deep and structured, but rather more fruit-expressive. Also from Jinshan, Jade Vineyard also released a very ripe, sumptuous and concentrated merlot this year from the 2019 vintage. Jade Vineyard Merlot Ningxia Heshan Single Reserve 嘉地酒园河山单一梅洛干红2019 shows nicely baked cherries with rose cake characters and velvety tannins.

In Shandong, Chateau Nine Peaks from Tsingtao and Longting Vineyard in Penglai delivered some exciting wines, too, from the more Atlantic 2020 vintage that rendered less power and richness than 2019 but came with more freshness, linearity and drinkability. As a blend of marselan, cabernet sauvignon, syrah and petit verdot, the Chateau Nine Peaks Tsingtao Qi Red 九顶庄园氣干红葡萄酒2020 is a complex and savory expression with a nose reminiscent of a fine Bordeaux. The petit verdot and the cabernet gernischt from their 2020 lineup are juicy, linear and elegant. The Chateau Nine Peaks Cabernet Gernischt Tsingtao Collection 九顶庄园蛇龙珠精选干红葡萄酒 2020 is all about crunchy red fruit, white pepper, rhubarb and Chinese herb character that extend to a linear and lingering finish.

In Shandong’s Penglai, Longting Vineyard delivered one of the best whites from China this week with the Longting Vineyard Petit Manseng Penglai Reserve 龙亭酒庄珍藏小芒森干白葡萄酒 2020, an off-dry white with close to eight grams of residual sugar beautifully balanced by fresh, high acidity and intense, tropical fruit as well as a subtle honey note and flinty allure.

– James Suckling, Editor/Chairman; 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.