Spanish Perfection, Joyfully Mosel and Finding Value in the Vale: Weekly Tasting Report (Aug 16-22)

This is a week for 100-point wines, with four out our seven perfect scorers coming from Spain, where a new generation is driving a renaissance toward freshness, clarity and drinkability.

James and Senior Editor Zekun Shuai were in Spain visiting top producers in Gredos, Rioja, Ribera del Duero and Priorat. In Gredos, Daniel Landi and Fernando Garcia of Comando G are making ever fresher, more intellectual and ethereal garnachas that underscore austerity and elegance rather than richness and opulence.

Walking in their Rumbo al Norte vineyard makes you think of discovering vines planted in the lost Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru, with gigantic granite rocks setting the scene. Very few would believe that this was once a nearly abandoned vineyard, just like many other vineyards in Gredos have been lost to time. But winemakers today are like treasure hunters looking for new possibilities in the region, especially among the higher sites with northern exposure around the Alberche River valley.

According to Daniel Landi, the co-owner and winemaker of Comando G, 2020 and 2021 were excellent vintages, with plentiful rainfall – even though 2023 is shaping up to be warm and dry.

“Here you have two kinds of vintages, warm and cold; Mediterranean and more Atlantic,” Landi said. “Here the best vintages are always the cooler ones. The more rain and mildew you have, the better wines you could make. 2010 was the first beautiful vintage but we were less prepared. 2013, 2016, 2018 and 2021 are the coolest. 2020 was close, but in September there were a few very warm days,” Landi said.

Their Rumbo al Norte 2020 and Tumba del Reymoro 2021 both received perfect scores. The wines show incredible energy rarely seen anywhere else, with a prominent reductive quality, airiness and complexity – all woven into a feather-light outfit. The wines, made using whole-bunch fermentation, are provocative in their transparency, intensity and flavor concentration. Zekun compared them to the finest Mezcal – full of wild herbs, berries, salinity, minerals and white pepper funk.

“Ten years ago, these pale, very transparent wines with a luminous ruby color would have been thought as diluted,” Landi said. “You wouldn’t want to hear what people said about us back then.”

The rise of the new generation of winemakers, with their intellectual and drinkable wines, shouldn’t be considered a threat to the more classic, dialed-back styles found in Rioja and Ribera del Duero. In Alava, Rioja, Juan Carlos Lopez de Lacalle’s single-vineyard expression Viña El Pisón is showing even more minerality and refinement, with the same precision that is the hallmark of Artadi’s best wines. The 2021 vintage is immediately attractive and approachable in its youth, but that doesn’t mean it won’t age well. For a long time, people believed it was the density or tannins or even oak that helped wines age, but ultimately we believe that balance is the key – with fine tannins, freshness and acidity the linchpins of durability.

For Peter Sisseck of Dominio de Pingus in Ribera del Duero, it has been a long journey in making necessary changes and fine-tuning their wines to get where they want to be amid a changing climatic scene.

“The true impact of climate change was felt in 2005, and we started dialing back in 2006,” he told us. “But we were still looking for ripeness at that time. Then 2009 and 2010 came and that was a sign. 2014 was classic and 2015 was warm again. The drastic change happened in 2016, and 2021 was in line with 2016.”

His 2021 vintage of Pingus is one of the best we know, with the convivial coexistence of depth and finesse matched with richness and freshness. As a brooding and embryonic Pingus, it will need time to unwind, but its impeccable balance means you won’t regret opening a bottle now.

JOYFULLY MOSEL

In Germany, Senior Editor Stuart Pigott visited some of the leading producers in the Rheinhessen region, including Weingut Keller, whose wines are a global cult.

Most of the top sites in the southeast of Rheinhessen in the Wonnegau subregion are on limestone, a rock that stores water very well. Logically, this should have given the area an advantage during the summer drought of 2022, and the wines of that vintage fully confirmed this. The other thing that they amply demonstrated was how the leading winemakers have honed their craft over the last quarter century.

No wine better epitomized all this than the breathtakingly beautiful Keller Riesling Rheinhessen Brunnenhäuschen Abts E GG 2022. Here, the finest stone fruit aromas are married to gigantic concentration, yet the wine also has incredible purity and precision.

Klaus-Peter Keller also cultivates some of the oldest riesling vines in the Mosel Valley, and from these he made another mind-blowing dry wine, the Keller Riesling Mosel Schubertslay Alte Reben GG 2022. In spite of its off-the-scale slatey minerality, this wine has the joyful light-footedness we associate with the Mosel.

People often think that there’s a secret to Keller’s success, but the precise way he analyzes this wine says everything. “Almost 130-year-old ungrafted vines in a great site, a lot of handwork and attention to details,” is how Keller describes it. “It is also an excellent example of what basket pressing does for the wine.“

Finesse and silkiness is what it gives you, but it also creates a lot of extra work in the present house.

Over in the opposite, northwestern corner of Rheinhessen the terroir is completely different, with volcanic porphyry and melaphry dominating the top sites. Here it was hard to know how the vines would react to the extreme conditions.

Certainly, the perfect Wagner-Stempel Riesling Rheinhessen EMT (Auction Wine) 2022 turned out spectacularly well, with the old vines in this plot of riesling in the Heerkretz site giving a remarkably powerful and sensual wine for the 2022 vintage. Daniel Wagner’s main bottling from that site, the Wagner-Stempel Riesling Rheinhessen Heerkretz GG 2022, is more extravagant on the mid-palate with aromas of tropical fruit, curry leaf and Thai basil, but it turns astonishingly graceful at the super-mineral finish.

If it’s power you are looking for in Rheinhessen riesling GGs, then take a look at the wines from the husband and wife team of H.O. Spanier and Carolin Spanier-Gillot, who run both the Battenfeld-Spanier winery and Kühling-Gillot. They showed Stuart a long row of highly structured riesling GGs that all have great concentration. The brightest of the many shining stars was the Kühling-Gillot Riesling Rheinhessen Rothenberg Wurzelecht GG 2022, which has essence-like stone fruit character and an almost endless finish. Although this is Gillot’s wine it is also Spanier’s work, because he is the winemaker for both these twin producers.

In Australia, Ned Goodwin MW was tasting a raft of wines from McLaren Vale that had him pondering the question of what “good value” in a wine actually means.

“From a critical perspective, we look for genuineness, poise and effortless drinkability,” Ned said. “In essence, quality fruit from a decent site to imbue a wine with a sense of place, a balance between fruit ripeness and a wine’s structural attributes (acidity and tannin), and a visceral sense that one glass is not enough as the outstretched arm reaches for the next. Real value is defined by wines that we can drink every day, with a price that reflects those qualities, rather than a silly heavy bottle, marketing campaign or notions of prestige.

“For some drinkers, an empty bottle is the end game,” he continued. “But for those of us who work with wine and critique it for a living, many wines are difficult to drink because the pillars outlined above are absent. After all, a wine may be well made from a technical perspective, but anodyne and without soul; or manicured with winemaking chicanery, resulting in shrill acidity and forced tannins. Other times, a wine may be too heavy and lack energy. Of course, much of this is highly subjective. Some drinkers simply don’t care, which is fine. ‘It’s just wine,’ they might aver, which is like saying to a football fan that ‘It’s just a game.’

Ned said that academic pursuits such as the Master of Wine or Master Sommelier draw on the acronym BLICC (balance, length, intensity, complexity and concentration) to objectively determine a wine’s quality irrespective of the taster’s personal preferences. This approach, however, is different from the tenets used to ascertain real value. After all, there are plenty of high-quality 95 point-plus wines that Ned says he would never drink. More often than not, his weekly diet consists of wines of character, balance and thirst-slaking freshness.

“Think cru Beaujolais as a template,” Ned said. “Savory, mid-weighted styles over heavy and sweet fruited ones, with tension conferred by real tannins and natural acidity. Real value wines, he suggests, often hover in the 89-93 point zone due to their innate prosaicness.”

A suite of delicious examples from a small Australian producer passed by his tasting bench this week. Saltfleet in McLaren Vale hits all the value buttons. These wines have soul: savory fruit, finessed tannins, juicy acidity and mellifluous drinkability due to a graceful poise. The grenache and sangiovese are particularly striking. Check out all the tasting notes below.

– Zekun Shaui, Stuart Pigott and Ned Goodwin MW 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.