2011 Keller Riesling G-Max

Served blind after the 2006 vintage as wine number 7 of the vertical tasting, Keller's 2011 Riesling G-Max opens clear, fresh and stony on the slightly animal as well as phenolic and still underdeveloped or overall restrained and rather cool nose. Juicy, dense and vital on the elegant palate but also quite ripe and very slightly draining on the citrusy finish, the 2006 seems a little too ambitious and exaggerated in the overly forced structure. Tasted at Steinheuer's Restaurant Zur Alten Post, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, in January 2024.

Tasted blind. After the first two, quite ‘sweet-nosed’ wines of this flight (the G-Max 2003 and 2006, it turned out), this third one returns to the traditional virtues of Riesling with aromas of waxy fruit peel, smoky minerality and green herbs. As far as age is concerned this G-Max is hard to place. A fresh vegetal note and tangy citrus nuances seem to point towards a youthful stage, whereas waxy and nutty accents would rather indicate that some development has taken place. Dynamic acidity, crisp juicy fruit and exotic spices set off a crescendo of flavours, which finally unite in a long and generous finish. A paragon of extract and, in its youthful beauty, almost timeless like Oscar Wilde’s picture of Dorian Gray. (MS)

Keller's 2011 Riesling G-Max is every bit as pithily concentrated as and scarcely less buoyant or energetic than the corresponding Abtserde, with piquant toasted nuts, legume sprouts, crushed stone, peat, iodine, fruit pit and citrus rinds that truly stain the palate. For all of its near-implosive density there is still lift along with torrential primary juiciness here (something I suspect it needs to keep bitterness at bay). I would expect excitement in following it - for the few who are able - over the next dozen or more years (and a bottle that had been open for a day was not less riveting than one freshly-opened). A recent opportunity to review the dozen vintages of Grosse Gewachse for which Klaus Peter Keller has been solely responsible at his family's estate brings home how the virtues of earlier bottlings have undergone clarification and refinement as well as intensification in more recent years, such that any extrapolation from the former to predict how the later will perform in bottle risks failing to do those wines justice. But, by the same token, there are too few wines enough like Keller's most recent G-Max and Abtserde bottlings to do better than speculate on their long-term evolution, let alone to rely on any existing, analogous track record. Cool nights from mid-summer on - but especially in October - played into and seemed to confirm Keller's strategy of depending on low temperatures to truly release the aromatic potential of Riesling grapes (though he is the first to admit that he hasn't a notion of why this is so). "It's critical that you wait for Riesling until you can get into that period" of chilly weather, he opines, "and this year there was no reason you couldn't wait; and then plenty of time to strategize picking. But," he adds, "you couldn't get there if you didn't leave large enough yields," because otherwise one's picking hand would be forced by potential alcohol. In this year, Keller was able to purchase from Franz Karl Schmitt his iconic, eponymous former estate's best parcels in Niersteiner Pettenthal and Hipping, sites with an illustrious reputation from bygone years that Keller has wasted no time in reviving and polishing. (It was inspiring to be able to walk these particular vineyards on the "Rotem Hang" with both of them late last summer and share in their obvious mutual delight at this historic real estate transaction.) Increased refinement, delicacy, and complexity continue to characterize the best of Keller's residually sweet wines, and it's clear that his range of "R" bottlings from top sites - approximately halbtrocken in specifications - is taken with increased seriousness and will expand, annually incorporating at least one such wine that (as is now also the case with Morstein, Abtserde and G-Max) won't be bottled before August or released before the following spring. Nor has Keller given up his intention - VDP ideology to the contrary notwithstanding - of rendering residually sweet Kabinett from his Nierstein crus; it's just that 2011 fruit was too ripe (and 2010 had been too scarce). Once again this year, despite devoting more time to tasting the wines of this estate than to those of almost any other, I still cannot pretend to have sampled Keller's entire 2011 vintage collection, the especially notable omissions being T.B.A.s from Hubacker and Kirchspiel. (Time has also conspired to keep me from reporting on Keller's 2009 Pinots, which I have as yet tasted only before they were assembled. Numerous details on Keller's sites, stylistic ideals, and labeling practices can be found in my issue 198 report. And, apropos labeling, Abtserde continues to have to appear in print as AbtsE-, even though for purposes of the Wine Advocate database we permit this site to state its name!)