2013 Reinhold Haart Wintricher Ohligsberg Riesling Spatlese A.P. #14

PnP 7.0% abv

This disappeared all too quickly.  :) A very nice wine. Quite heady stuff.

Delicious blast of tropical fruit with a finely chiseled edge of acidity to balance things out. Savory ripeness and salinity. One of my favorite 2013's so far.  The intensity of fruit reminded me of the 2013 Selbach-Oster Zeltinger Schlossberg "Schmitt", yet it stops short of being an Auslese.

The nose is a bit shy but has alluring waft of petrol scent that is intoxicating...

Paired this with speck prior to dinner, and then stuffed pork chops with arancini...

Notes from the Mosel Fine Wines Report...

"...Johannes Haart replied with a short and to-the-point “surprisingly satisfied” to the question on his impression of the vintage before providing some explanation to this statement: “Honestly, I was fearing the worst when we came to the hot period of the harvest. We wanted to wait for the acidity to come down but we had no choice as the grapes, which are mostly trained on wire, started to take on a brown color, sometimes overnight (!) and this threatened to jeopardize our whole harvest. I would not have believed anyone who would have told me the delicious result we got out of those grapes! We did the harvest in two waves, a first Vorlese from October 15 to October 23, during which we brought in the bulk of the fruit, and then a
second, for the top wines, from October 27 until November 2, during which we also brought in a small amount of highly botrytized fruit. As a result, we were able to save some of the fruit and ended of course with low yields (of 40 hl/ha) but, at least, we had some yields! The fermentation (done with ambient yeasts) was quicker than usual. In order to give the wines more body, we decided to leave the dry wines on their fine lees, without sulfur, for a short period of time, and more generally left the wines longer than usual on their fine lees. Furthermore we only bottled between end of May and mid-June.” Theo Haart compares the vintage to his 1991 (“1991 was also quite high in acidity and we had some issues of rot … and at the end the vintage turned out much better than initially expected!”) while Johannes sees more parallels with their 1996 (NB: a quite successful vintage 
at this Estate)...."

The picture shows the Goldtröpfchen Amphitheatre with Ohligsberg to the right.