The 2013 Dalsheim Hubacker Riesling trocken is not a wine for easy consumption since the nose already is developing from minute to minute gaining more and more complex. Unusually pure and mineral on the nose, the "Hubi" 2013 offers rather green flavors of limes, herbs, peas, tobacco, and morels along with just a hint of pie-plant. Full-bodied, intense, piquant and penetrating mineral makes this 2013 one of, if not the most, impressive Hubackers Keller ever produced. The combination of finesse and elegance with power and persistence is really fascinating here.

Pear, zesty lime and pineapple close to the core ally themselves to crystalline, alkaline and stony notes in Keller's 2011 Dalsheimer Hubacker Riesling Grosses Gewachs, leading to a juicy palate impression and finish that positively shimmer. Coriander seed, grapefruit rind, peach kernel, nut oils and quinine add piquant pungency to this impressively persistent performance that should be worth following for at least a decade. This site tends to wear its extract on its sleeve, but fortunately that doesn't this year preclude succulence, lift or refreshment. I think of Kirchspiel as feline, whereas Hubacker is a rather large canine bounding into your lap. Cool nights from mid-summer on - but especially in October - played into and seemed to confirm Keller's strategy of depending on low temperatures to truly release the aromatic potential of Riesling grapes (though he is the first to admit that he hasn't a notion of why this is so). "It's critical that you wait for Riesling until you can get into that period" of chilly weather, he opines, "and this year there was no reason you couldn't wait; and then plenty of time to strategize picking. But," he adds, "you couldn't get there if you didn't leave large enough yields," because otherwise one's picking hand would be forced by potential alcohol. In this year, Keller was able to purchase from Franz Karl Schmitt his iconic, eponymous former estate's best parcels in Niersteiner Pettenthal and Hipping, sites with an illustrious reputation from bygone years that Keller has wasted no time in reviving and polishing. (It was inspiring to be able to walk these particular vineyards on the "Rotem Hang" with both of them late last summer and share in their obvious mutual delight at this historic real estate transaction.) Increased refinement, delicacy, and complexity continue to characterize the best of Keller's residually sweet wines, and it's clear that his range of "R" bottlings from top sites - approximately halbtrocken in specifications - is taken with increased seriousness and will expand, annually incorporating at least one such wine that (as is now also the case with Morstein, Abtserde and G-Max) won't be bottled before August or released before the following spring. Nor has Keller given up his intention - VDP ideology to the contrary notwithstanding - of rendering residually sweet Kabinett from his Nierstein crus; it's just that 2011 fruit was too ripe (and 2010 had been too scarce). Once again this year, despite devoting more time to tasting the wines of this estate than to those of almost any other, I still cannot pretend to have sampled Keller's entire 2011 vintage collection, the especially notable omissions being T.B.A.s from Hubacker and Kirchspiel. (Time has also conspired to keep me from reporting on Keller's 2009 Pinots, which I have as yet tasted only before they were assembled. Numerous details on Keller's sites, stylistic ideals, and labeling practices can be found in my issue 198 report. And, apropos labeling, Abtserde continues to have to appear in print as AbtsE-, even though for purposes of the Wine Advocate database we permit this site to state its name!) Imported by Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608 9644, Dee Vine Wines, San Francisco, CA tel. (877) 389-9463, and Frances Rose Imports Inc., Huntley, IL; tel. (815) 382 9533

Finishing at a mere 12.4% alcohol even though not picked until mid-November, Keller’s 2010 Dalsheimer Hubacker Riesling Grosses Gewachs smells of apple, pear, and white peach garlanded in hedge flowers and thyme, which come onto the palate expansively, generously juicy and persistently perfumed for a performance of vivacity and levity that finishes with wafting, glowing persistence, subtly bitter suggestions of fruit pit and pip adding invigorating counterpoint. This is to be sure less dense or mineral in flavor than the corresponding Kirchspiel (which comes from some of Keller’s oldest vines) but how much more winsome and (to this taster at least) psychically uplifting! Plan to follow it for the next 6-8 years. I considered leading off my introduction to the 2010 vintage with a quote from Klaus Keller senior, utilized for the estate’s own vintage report: “We have never experienced a vintage in which along the way we stood so near the qualitative abyss and in the end harvested such fantastic quality.” “It’s not easy to explain all of the efforts we made in 2010,” says Klaus Peter Keller of a collection enormously impressive even by his recent standards and which he claims cost a record number of man-hours, “but certainly the best recipe was to postpone harvest for as long as possible – by which time, the other growers in our sector had long since finished – and then correct (acids) only moderately. With patience and low yields, everything was possible. We only began picking Riesling near the end of October, and for the basic (i.e. generic) level of wines we had to de-acidify from 12 to 10.5 grams, which after tartrate precipitation and fermentation resulted in around 9 grams,” still high for German Riesling, which is to say for any dry wine! “With the parcels we harvested into November,” though, Keller continues, “we didn’t have to correct acidity at all,” and the musts for dry wines registered in the 8-10 gram range. For controlling dauntingly high (13-19 grams) acidity in the eventual sweet wines, Keller emphasized the significance of his having employed a basket press recently acquired from the Mosel that permits introduction of buffering matter without the risk he felt would be run by extended skin contact in wines where “you already had no end of extract and risked ending up with something bitter, ponderous and lacking in tension or interplay.” Not that Keller believes the basket press superior merely for dry wine, quite the contrary. He finds it conducive – indeed, he suggests “critical” – to elegance and transparency in residually sweet Riesling as well. And this – along with generally restrained and especially well-judged sugar levels – has made for as fine a collection at that end of the stylistic spectrum as I have yet witnessed at this address. Finished alcohol levels for all of this year’s dry Rieslings ranged between 12-13% (with one of the Grosse Gewachse as low as 12.2%), the lowest levels since Klaus Peter Keller has been working his family’s vines, but, he emphasizes, more than enough – indeed, more than merely fine – by him, given the flattering flavors and textures he achieved. Keller began bottling the Grosse Gewachse in late spring, with the Morstein, Abtserde, and G-Max bottled mid-August and not due for release until spring 2012. For all of the astonishing range – not to mention quality – of wines that Keller rendered from 2010, one category near to his heart, residually sweet Kabinett, was simply not possible from any of the material he harvested. The latest amazing array of Keller Trockenbeerenauslesen finished fermenting already by June and so was bottled before high summer. “You’re always going to get at least a bit of malo-lactic transformation in wines of this sort that sit for a very long time,” he says by way of explaining his decision to bottle them when he did. Note that as explained in Issue 192, the name of the site Abtserde continues to appear on Keller’s labels as AbtsE, since it remai

Keller’s 2009 Dalsheimer Hubacker Riesling Grosses Gewachs offers a somehow cooler but no less complex or mysterious floral bouquet – here suggestive of gentian and iris – than did its counterpart from 2008. Scents and saliva-inducing impingement of apple, fresh lime, chalk, and salt ignites an invigorating, almost levitating finishing interchange of fresh and distilled fruit, floral, fruit pit, and mineral elements. Dynamically bright yet coolly refreshing and with a striking, shimmering sense of clarity (but by no means cool in the stand-offish manner of the corresponding Kirchspiel), this beauty should be fascinating to follow over the next dozen or more years. No doubt Keller is correct – these are, after all, among his own precious children – in judging this Hubacker to be at a more expressive stage than the corresponding (in his words “shier, more restrained”) Kirchspiel, but I perceive the expression of brightness and minerality of Hubacker as inherently more engaging. Klaus-Peter Keller’s stylistic ideals and parameters – for more about whose application to vintage 2009 consult the quotes from him at two places in my introduction to this report – were aptly realized in a collection of Grosse Gewachse (all bottled in mid-August) that ranged from 12.5-13.5% in alcohol. “I can always cut away bunches,” he remarked apropos yields. “That merely means extra work. But you can’t hang new bunches on your vines, and in warm years, to have that third or fourth one is critical” to avoiding too rapid an accretion of sugar. The cool temperatures by the time he harvested his top sites in early November not only, claims Keller, offered the ideal circumstances for phenolic evolution and acid retention, but also for gentle extraction in the initial hours after harvest, when the fruit received the period of maceration that he believes is essential to getting at “the two-thirds of Riesling’s aromas are in its skin.” And as if the rest of the wines did not represent a sufficiently amazing performance, it concludes with no fewer than four Trockenbeerenauslesen (5 were planned, but the grapes left in Hubacker got rained-out), about which Keller claims not to know for sure whether it represents a record for his estate (though it definitely does for the period of his tenure, and – unbelievably – he repeated that record again in 2010). “Day in, day out we sorted grapes into the night,” relates Keller, but it should be borne in mind that the quantities of each of these T.B.A.s – as I have noted in each tasting note – remained minuscule. Keller is excited about 2009’s potential with Pinot as well, but surveying his finished 2008 Spatburgunder – all of which were moved solely by gravity, a forklift having served to elevate their assembled volumes for bottling – there is more than enough excitement generated by those as well to merit a search of the marketplace and to offer wine lovers a striking glimpse of the quality levels to which German Pinot Noir can successfully aspire. I’ll report on the 2009 reds next year. (For more about Keller’s governing principles with Riesling as well as Pinot, consult the introduction to my notes on his wines in issue 187.) Imported by Sussex Wine Merchants, Moorestown, NJ; tel. (856) 608 9644, Dee Vine Wines, San Francisco, CA tel. (877) 389-9463, and Frances Rose Imports Inc., Huntley, IL; tel. (815) 382 9533