2024 MERKELBACH – THE VINTAGE

As you know, Selbachs make the wines now, following the passings of the Merkelbach brothers. Rolf and Alfred’s methods are being followed, in order to preserve their Edenic style, their lightness, and their freedom from affect.

What I don’t know is whether the old viticulture is being continued, including harvesting dates and methods. I trust it is being followed at least in spirit, because a precise facsimile seems impossible. Given that most of the vines grow in the classic single-stake “heart-binding” and given their venerable age, yields tend to take care of themselves. Harvesting is perhaps more selective – better said, evenmore selective – than in Rolf and Alfred’s time, but these days yields are further reduced by the presence of phylloxera in many parcels.

There are fewer wines now. I doubt we’ll see more than six or seven wines even in a generous vintage, as contrasted with the 12-13 wines I offered in many earlier instances.

(An aside: one year the wines were so consistently excellent, cask by cask – and I was always shown every cask in the cellar – that I couldn’t find anything to “reject,” and so announced to the brothers that I wanted them all. Well, you never saw such mixed emotions on two peoples’ faces. On one hand they were pleased how much I regarded the crop, but they also had customers other than me, and they knew they’d have to disappoint someone. I felt for their plight, and surmounted my unseemly greed.)

Back in those days they had leased parcels (two, if memory serves) in Erdener Treppchen, and they may have had other leases in Kinheim and certainly in Uerzig. The holdings now are smaller, and I might theorize that Selbachs combine fuders from time to time, though they surely don’t need to in stingy harvests.

I must also repeat; the wines are not intended as homage and assuredly not as nostalgia. The word I would use is “neighborliness.” The Mosel culture is close and cohesive, even to this day, and Merkelbachs were noteworthy, and what made them noteworthy was an aesthetic value very much worth preserving. And, Sigrid Selbach (Johannes’ late mother) and Rolf Merkelbach were in the same class in Kindergarten. You see? Neighbors, linked to one another and to a place and a culture.

Of course when I sit down to taste them they start out as just-wines. But without context that is all they would be, and that is never all they can be. I have many vintages in my cellar – 2005, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2015 – and each time I open a bottle I can be relied upon to cry with gratitude and loss. We all deserve to have some wine somewhere that acts as a paradigm for honesty and purity. At least I hope so. Mine are these.