Reuscher Haart Piesporter Goldtropfchen Riesling Kabinett

The Family... Hugo Schwang and his two sons run Reuscher-Haart, and they do it in accord with the traditions of winemaking in their homeland. They use natural, not cultured yeasts. They allow extended lees contact for richness and aromatic complexity. The Schwangs farm 4.5 hectares of slate-rich vineyard land, and bottle slightly under 3,000 cases of wine per year. They are as real an example of small-family farming as you could wish to find, and their wines offer a perfect interpretation of the real wine Piesport should be known for. Almost too enjoyable for their own good, which is not a problem I worry about much.

The Name... A lot of wine drinkers know the term Piesporter. They may have encountered a single-vineyard wine from one of the relatively famous wineries to bottle wine from the vineyards of this town in the southern Mosel valley of Germany. Or they may be familiar with grosslagen wine from this village, particularly Piesporter Michelsberg. A grosslage is a regional amalgam, a wine blended from a largish region around the town whose name precedes it, and few terms are as unintentionally euphonically apt. These wines are generally nasty, maybe a step up qualitatively from liebfraumilch, but in my experience only a small step.

The Wine... So, to clarify, Piesporter Michelsberg is a low-grade regional wine that we’ll probably never sell, Piesporter Goldtröpchen and Piesporter Falkenberg (the real object of our attention) are single-vineyard wines from the line of steep hills that sit behind the pretty village of Piesport. Steep by any standards, other than those set by Mosel villages to the immediate north (Berncastel, Zeltingen, Ürzig) where the landscape becomes dizzying. Falkenberg is the highest part of the Goldtröpchen slope, a special climat that in this vintage yielded fruit for Reuscher Haart that would almost qualify to be labeled as Auslese. Very ripe.