WTN: St.-Urbans-Hof

So the other week I went into a small shop that's on my daily commute and saw a bin of St.-Urbans-Hof 2015 Riesling Piesporter Goldtröpfchen Kabinett. I don't have experience with the producer but I have positive associations with the site (from Haart), so I thought I'd get a couple. But it turned out that only one of the bottles in the bin was from 2015: as the owner explained, the distributor had subbed 2011 for 2015 in their last shipment. She commented that the staff had tasted both vintages and that she preferred the 2011 anyway. Okay, I thought; we'll do the same comparison. I got one of each. Tonight we tasted them side by side. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the elements overlapped: gentle, half-creamy, half-zesty tree fruit and citrus backed by modest minerality. The biggest difference was in the palate profile -- I mean "profile" in the same sense as the elevation profile for a bicycle race, which shows the climbs and descents from the beginning to the end of the route. The 2015 was rounder and richer, with a big burst of ripe fruit up front and then a gradual decline toward indifference. The 2011 had a slightly more restrained attack and was sustained by more assertive midpalate and finishing minerality. But both wines seemed pretty unstructured and became cloying and dull pretty quickly. I have a hard time imagining that either of them would age well, but I dunno. Am I missing something?

[David M. Bueker]

Sounds very odd. I'm not a big PG fan, as I think the vineyard has gotten beat on by climate change, but those don't sound like St. Urbans-Hof wines. They also don't sound like the respective vintages. 2011 is the flab fest, and 2015 has higher than average acid in the Middle Mosel.

My positive PG associations were shaped 15 years ago; sounds like they're out of date. And I suppose that the four years' difference might have stripped some baby fat off the 2011? But I guess I'm weirdly reassured that this is puzzling to you too. We have a third of each bottle remaining; we'll see what they do overnight.

Is it appropriate to give the standard inquiries about 'damaged bottle'? Cheap, but sometimes relevant.

Cloying dull wines without structure are possible heat damage signs. Not sure how things looked in the store. Or (of course) what happened before the wine got to the store.

Don't be inappropriate!

But seriously, that occurred to me too; though if it was heat damage, I doubt it was the shop, which is only months rather than years old, uncrowded, stock well away from windows, etc. -- and the bottles were purchased before this year's first heat waves. They also looked in fine shape, and whatever else might have been true about the wines, the flavors seemed fresh in a way that didn't make me suspect damage; but I may have too narrow a sense of the likely symptoms.

In short: who knows? I'm just glad they weren't particularly expensive bottles.

[David M. Bueker]

For whatever it's worth, I prefer the Leiwener Laurentiuslay and Ockfener Bockstein wines from St. Urbans-Hof.

I tend to find the PG wines on closeout, which tells me I am not the only one that feels that way.

That's helpful, thanks -- I think I've seen the Ockfener Bocksteins in this market, though not at this shop. (And although don't really know how this stuff works, I wouldn't be surprised if this shop, being small and new and neighborhoody, was at the bottom of some distributors' pecking orders -- though they have some nifty stuff, too.)

I've had both Goldtröpfchen and Bockstein St. Urbans-Hof Kabinetten from the '15 vintage, and had quite different experiences from this thread. I opened the PG on January 1st and it was finely structured, full of tension with very high but (for me at least) balanced acidity. A true joy to drink.

The OB I had at the end of April however was not yielding much, neither in the nose nor on the palate, which was quite strange as I find that immature Rieslings from good producers are still very pleasing on the palate even if they're aromatically shy. For what it's worth, it was also noted as being 'off' in the reports for the "2015 Berlin Kabinett cup".

[David M. Bueker]

Nik's wines tend to have a sponti-funk like old school Prum that takes a while to go away.

Yes, I recently had a couple '09s that still had marked sponti, but these '15s very remarkably pure with none whatsoever, and also a '12 Bockstein GG I had a year ago was immaculate. Makes me wonder whether it's just vintage-dependant or if their wines are moving away from the sponti-heavy style as a whole in the recent vintages.

48 hours later, with my impressions unavoidably colored by this discussion, I can report that the 2011, while still showing slightly darker and drier flavors than the 2015, remains dull, while the 2015 is still riper and more tropical but also shows more spine than it did on the first night. Sort of pineapply, in a good way. (There was definitely no sponti impression on either bottle.) I was also interested to see Schildknecht's report today, which was pretty positive on PG in general in 2015, including the St. Urbans-Hof, and whose impressions of the Bockstein echoed Timo's.

As the kids say these days: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[David M. Bueker]

Go figure.

Archive.

Nick Weis was in town last night and a great tasting with nicely flavoured sausages and all the trimmings. 5 nice wines from recent vintages and a great evening.