Full disclosure; I have a small-scaled but very sweet commercial relationship with this estate, whereby I
broker them to a couple old customers in unfussy quantities. Accordingly, I’m going to do what I did in catalogues, and tell you about my favorites among the wines I tasted, and which I decided to offer.
It came to me through a friend – Andrea and Christoph Schaefer (of the estate Willi Schaefer) are friends with Cantzheim’s proprietor Anna Reimann, and after a recent visit there, it seemed my name came up. Would I be interested in tasting the wines, just as a friend? Well of course.
Samples came to me many months later, mostly 2018s, and while I was certainly curious I was also the tiniest bit trepidatious, because what if I wasn’t enthused?
The first wine I opened was the ’18 estate feinherb – which they call die Gärtnerin, and which I promptly fell in love with. That was promising, but obviously not conclusive. Five wines later, with nothing but beauties among them, I was thrilled and intrigued. I wrote a (properly) flattering letter to Ms. Reimann, and floated the idea of doing a little business. Cantzheim is a small winery, with no great need to bother over “tonnage” in the American market, and I was an embryonic broker who thought it would be lovely to help a few folks out.
The tasting report will show my favorites among the 2020s, which I have just finished tasting and which I tasted according to the protocols I’ve evolved – tasting over many days, from different stems, indoor and out, with food and by themselves – whereas the notes for the 2018s are straight from my notebook in the way I tasted before, i.e., like everyone else.
So where does one find them in the US?