Keller's 2022 Riesling Westhofener Kirchspiel GG opens with a clear, elegant, dense and chalky nose with a ripe, intense fruit and notes reminiscent of iodine. Elegant, dense and chalky on the palate, with an intense, tightly woven and salty-savory finish, this is an excellent finessed Kirchspiel and very typical for its terroir.

Pungent lime peel, quinine, and kirsch in the nose of Keller's 2011 Westhofener Kirchspiel Riesling Grosses Gewachs lead into a bright, tart, zesty palate featuring the pungency and piquancy promised in the nose, along with a strong sense of crushed stone suffusion. While this lacks the surprising openness and infectious juiciness exhibited by Wittmann's corresponding rendition, or the combination of richness with buoyancy that characterize Keller's legally halbtrocken RR bottling from another part of this site, it is formidably and stimulatingly persistent as well as capital "M" mineral, and ought to be fascinating to follow for the better part of a decade. "This rocky, stony character appeals to me a lot," notes Keller. 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

The Keller 2010 Westhofener Kirchspiel Riesling Grosses Gewachs delivers zesty fresh lemon and milled grain on the nose as well as on a firm, overtly chalk-dusted palate for a personality more than a little reminiscent of a high-acid (and indeed, high-strung!) white Burgundy. A welcome, saliva-inducing sense of salinity emerges in a glowingly persistent finish, with piquancy of peach kernel and almond lending some counterpoint. This understated, relatively austere but (at just 12.2% alcohol) buoyant and intense Riesling should be worth following for at least the next half dozen years, though it will have to prove to me that it can become more friendly than formidable. There are, incidentally, a mere 500 liters, the smallest lot of Grosses Gewachs in this collection. 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

The Keller 2009 Westhofener Kirchspiel Riesling Grosses Gewachs features pungent, piquant lime zest, peach kernel, and cherry pit allied to tart citrus and yellow plum, salt and chalk, all of which make for an almost fiercely penetrating and invigoratingly persistent if spare and lightly astringent performance. This certainly isn’t about flattery or ingratiation. German growers and critics love applying the word “puristic” to such a Riesling, which I suppose is better than “puritanical” – but my, is this wine strict! As it took on air, a slightly more enticing, saliva-inducing sense of salinity and shellfish reduction emerged. I don’t envision it ever achieving the delicacy and poise that its 2008 rendition displayed even at this young age, but it should certainly be fascinating as well as palate-stimulating to follow in the course of the coming decade. While Keller has now begun to implement the plan I discussed in issue 187 of releasing some Grosse Gewachse only in the year after bottling, that delayed release will not apply to either the Hubacker or Kirchspiel, although based on my perception of the latter’s personality, it above all should be considered as a candidate. 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