“Well, first of all, it’s riesling.”
Fred Merwarth, owner/winemaker at Hermann J. Wiemer Vineyards, was explaining how he put together the blend for his 2019 Seneca Lake Reserve Dry Riesling. “You can find beauty and balance at almost every step in its ripening,” he said. “So, if you’re picking one day, you can’t help but be curious about how it’s going to express itself in two weeks.” There are other varieties with range, he admitted, but nothing rewards his curiosity like riesling.
Wiemer’s wine was one of several that led me to award some of the highest scores I’ve given to riesling, including 100 points for Eroica’s 2012 Single Berry Select (see the tasting report beginning on page 47). In discussions with Merwarth, as well as with Eroica’s partner winemakers, Ernst Loosen, of Dr. Loosen in the Mosel, and David Rosenthal, of Chateau Ste. Michelle, they acknowledged riesling’s range of expression and astonishing versatility, explaining that, to them, riesling simply didn’t behave like other grapes. Each of these winemakers, in his own way, hopes to come to terms with riesling’s paradoxical nature, a variety that is both expressive of place and rewards intervention, tinkering and the active pursuit of ideals.
Hermann J. Wiemer, a Bernkastel-native and Geisenheim grad, had just planted the Magdalena Vineyard when Fred Merwarth joined him as an apprentice in 2001. The Josef Vineyard, planted in 1996, was just coming into the mix and Merwarth helped oversee both new sites. He took the reins at Wiemer in 2004; when he and his partners became owners in 2007, the vines at Josef were 11 and at Magdalena six. As a winemaker, he’s grown up with them.
The two vineyards—about ten miles north of Wiemer’s original planting at HJW—are windswept parcels closer to the lake and its modulating influence. For Merwarth, fruit from the three vineyards has amounted to a Seneca color palette, variable components with which he builds eight to ten blends in each vintage.
For years, Merwarth and his business partner, Oskar Bynke, worked on detailed flavor maps of their vineyards, trying to codify what they learned from each vintage: the spot in HJW that gives golden-apple flavors at a certain Brix level, but devolves into mango or pineapple if you wait; or the lower rows in Josef that throw a bigger canopy, which they now allow, abetting botrytis. But they found that the maps were of limited use: “Weather inevitably throws something at you,” he says.
“At every point, you have to contemplate how your decisions will impact the wine’s ultimate expression,” says Merwarth. To give himself still more permutations, he employs multiple picks—as many as ten in each vineyard. “It’s really a means to an end,” he says. “Multiple picks strip away the need to make any additions or subtractions in the cellar. It forces you to look at your picking, and puts a lot of pressure and emphasis on these selections. I think this approach gives us the clarity to discover a vineyard’s possibilities.”
With his platoon of steel tanks, Merwarth finds himself faced with dozens of decisions. Some are predetermined, locked in by must weights, potential alcohols or ripeness levels. Some are pragmatic, like how to reach the production goals of their largest bottling, the Dry Riesling. Some blocks are predisposed to certain bottlings because of their chemistry: The lion’s share of Wiemer’s Reserve Dry, for example, comes from Josef, because of the way that vineyard’s fruit retains acidity.
After that, however, Merwarth characterizes fermentations and blending as, literally, acts of preservation. It’s the opportunity to build, say, an ideal expression of HJW from four different components—and to leave out what detracts from that ideal. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What are the critical points where you don’t influence it?’ Whether you stop the fermentation or let it continue to dryness, whether you let any botrytis into the blend. All of those decisions are connected to your sense of this place. Because there is no terroir without them.”
When Ernst Loosen came from the Mosel to the Columbia Valley, sussing out the project that would become Eroica, he knew that potential acreage for riesling in Washington State could dwarf that of Germany. He came, in other words, because the valley represented opportunity. But he wasn’t starting from zero. “To make great riesling, you have to start with an idea in your head,” he says. “Mine came from a long tradition, from my father and grandfather.”
Over time, Loosen started asking himself, what was the perfect style for Washington State? Sweet? A little sweet? Totally dry? “I didn’t want to get too German about it,” he says, “but there had to be some ideal expression.” In the end, he hit upon a halbtrocken—or half-dry—style, the name of which, feinherb, had fallen out of use after the advent of German wine laws of the 1970s. “It still tastes dry,” he says, “but it’s actually 14 to 16 grams per liter of residual sweetness.” For the last 20 years, the Eroica team has aimed for feinherb, and a textural quality Loosen calls trinkfluss, literally “drink-flow,” capturing a balance of energy and sweetness. “This,” he says, “was the perfect style for Eroica.”
That pursuit took the partners north and west, closer to the spine of the Cascades, to a scrabbly elevated benchland overlooking the Columbia River, a district called the Ancient Lakes. They planted the Evergreen Vineyard, where the vines wake up weeks later than in the rest of the valley and the fruit develops aromas much later in its maturity. Loosen advised the vineyard crews to prune for larger crops, and had them shade the fruit with sprawling canopies, hoping to slow the advance of sugar ripeness. The benchland, carved from uneven layers of basalt, had contours that dipped and rose—climate pockets that rewarded multiple harvest dates and fermentation lots, and lent complexity and shading to the blend. Trinkfluss, with benefits. Within a decade Eroica had become the benchmark riesling for the state.
Chateau Ste. Michelle is the largest producer of riesling in the world, larger than any in Germany. According to David Rosenthal, the winery draws from 35 riesling vineyards and 131 blocks. Of their 165 separate fermentation lots eligible for Eroica, they use about forty to craft the brand’s five bottlings—the basic (in a feinherb style), Gold (some botrytis), XLC (extended lees contact), ice wine, and Single Berry Select, their (nearly) 100 percent botrytised wine. Brix at harvest ranges from 21.2 to nearly 50 for Single Berry Select. Merwarth has a platoon of tanks; Rosenthal has a regiment.
“We get everything from your ultra-lime-zest, bone-dry Aussie style, all the way to ripe peach, dribble-down-your-chin summer flavors,” Rosenthal adds, “Everything is on the table until the last minute. We’re playing with the fruit matrix, but we’re also blending different types of acidity. For instance, in the Ancient Lakes we get a really high malic acid, in addition to high tartaric. But in warmer sites, you get a less malic, fleshier style of acid, it’s almost a full-bodied style of acid. Each of these hits the tongue in a very specific way.”
For Single Berry Select they employ a single vineyard near the banks of the Columbia in the Horse Heaven Hills, where the moisture pattern, according to Loosen, is as conducive to botrytis as any in the world. For years, the Single Berry Select was a 100 percent botrytis juggernaut, as massive and powerful as a riesling could be, anchored by sugar levels that often far exceeded most wines of its type in Germany. But in 2012, Loosen and Rosenthal decided to include about 10 percent healthy fruit. The effect was mesmerizing. Like a sunbeam through a break in the clouds, the freshness threw the botrytised fruit into perfect relief: instead of just massive, it was now massive with detail.
Asking someone like Loosen about riesling terroir can be treacherous. “I’m used to producing different styles every year, Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese—it’s the tradition,” he says. Naturally you want to highlight what nature provides. But when you’re making wine you have to interfere. If I left it to God and nature what I’d most likely get is vinegar, you know?”
Merwarth isn’t German, but he’s well-versed in the tradition that Loosen describes: “Every vintage I ask myself what, this year, is my best presentation of Magdalena? Of HJW? I’ve worked enough vintages and tasted enough Kabinetts and Spätleses to know how to aim for a style that will be in that sphere. So, the question is, what are you willing to influence; and how do we construct a wine that will get there?”
Merwarth mentioned a conversation he had with an old friend and customer who asked which parts of winemaking detracted from the expression of place. “It made me think through the entirety of the winemaking process,” says Merwarth, “to self-evaluate what I believed our terroir to be; was I doing everything I could to express it to its fullest, in terms of picking, yeasts, fermentation vessels? At each point the winemaker will say, ‘That is the best expression of the fruit.’ Well, says who?”
And then he answers his own question. “‘Says the human responsible for influencing the terroir for that wine from that piece of land.’”
Patrick J. Comiskey covers US wines for Wine & Spirits magazine, focusing on the Pacific Northwest, California’s Central Coast and New York’s Finger Lakes.
This story appears in the print issue of August 2021.
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