Sporting a truly lovely new label to boot. And it is a rare thing when I find a label change improves the appearance of a German wine bottle….
All the everyday wines are finished with diam corks, and for my first pass through them I have deliberately not consulted Florian’s website for information of details. Finally, of the ten wines I have broken them into two flights of five, with each going from dry to Feinherb to “sweet.”
2021 is an atypical year for Weingart, though they’re quite typical for ‘21s. Florian observes that vintages of the 80s and 90s, with similar analytical values, would have had riper-tasting, peachier fruit, and he isn’t sure why. His hypothesis is complex, and has to do with several years of drought stress combined with short-term depletion of several soil substances, having in turn to do with ever more organic viticulture. “It’s a kind of fatigue in the vines,” he says, adding that the silver lining is “avoidance of excessive vigour and vigour induced rot that is a massive problem with earlier veraison at higher temperatures.”
Something I like about Florian is that his mind sees every aspect of a situation, and shrinks from facile value-judgments. He is also fearlessly original, without his wines being odd or self-consciously “idiosyncratic.” It makes him hard to pigeonhole, which is fine with him, and with me.
The robust acids of the ’21 vintage gave rise to a general tendency to reduce it by various means. Not every grower and not every wine, but in such years there are typically two kinds of vintners – those who deacidified and admit it, and those who decidified and deny it. The practice can be carried out in several ways, each of which has its adherents, yet typically for Florian, he has one practice he seems to prefer but has his eye on the other(s) in case they might work better in a different style of crop. That said, his ‘21s are higher than usual in acidities, and like much of the vintage they tend toward tarter more malic kinds of fruit; quince rather than nectarine.
