Wagner-Stempel - Heerkretz Pinot Noir 2019
We are drinking a bottle of 2019 Heerkretz Pinot Noir Grosses Gewächs from the Wagner-Stempel estate in Rheinhessen.
That one? Yes, that one still can wait. And that one? That one too. And then you finally open the bottle and it’s done for. The eternal inner struggle to find the right moment to pull the bark from a bottle is particularly tough when you’ve only bought a few bottles, or even just a single bottle, of a wine. You might miss out, or open it too early, or too late, or catch it in a bad phase. Searching the internet for other people who happened to have opened exactly this wine helps a little. But whether their palate matches your own, and whether your bottle is at the same point or not, you only find out upon opening. Fundamentally, I believe that opening too early is much less of a problem than opening too late, especially if you only have a few bottles. And you can always give the wine some air at home. The uncertainty sometimes remains, and this bottle of Spätburgunder Heerkretz GG 2019 from Wagner-Stempel is one such example where I had no idea at all whether I should open it now or wait. In the end, curiosity won. And there’s still a second bottle, with which I’ll hopefully be also lucky with the cork. Fingers crossed.
This Spätburgunder is Wagner-Stempel’s first red Grosses Gewächs. Somewhere in the back of my mind, whenever I saw the bottle, I always thought I’d read it should be left to age a bit longer. I can’t even recall exactly why. Probably a lot of reduction. In general, I’ve read repeatedly about the vintages that followed that the Heerkretz Pinots vary greatly from year to year. So, drawing conclusions from this bottle and this vintage to the others is probably difficult. The vines for this wine grow in a single parcel in the Heerkretz on stony gravel and loam soils, with the typical porphyry beneath. Harvested by hand, then matured for a year and a half in used oak.
At first, I immediately know why I kept that thought in the back of my mind. It’s pretty funky. Lots of blood, animal stable, strongly reductive. But if you keep sticking your nose in the glass, it disappears quite quickly. I can imagine it behaved very differently a few years ago. Behind that, there’s cherry candy, smoke, and dry wood. A touch of raspberry jam, but without the sweetness, leather, and vanilla pod. There’s a lot of grip on the palate, acidity and tannins latch on, but don’t scratch. And even when drinking, the Pinot starts off without fruit, but it develops slowly, sip by sip. Cherry juice, lots of structure, some dry wood in the flavor as well. I can’t shake the feeling that the wine could still use a bit more time and that, right now, you’re only scratching the surface. But it is very enjoyable.
Day two. The funk remains. But now less bloody, somehow darker, harder to pin down, and can’t hold its ground as long before the fruit starts to rein it in. The fruit is also darker now, there’s plum with the cherry, bitter liqueur, blood orange, and then the reduction comes back. When you sniff, you never quite know who’s in charge, which makes the wine totally fascinating. Every time you smell it, it’s different, and since neither reduction nor fruit is showy or exhausting, every sniff is a pleasure. The tannins have softened significantly when drinking, they no longer latch on and the acidity washes over more quickly. Herbs are joining the cherry now, and I find it incredibly compelling at the moment. At the same time, I can easily imagine this being one of those mood-dependent wines that I might find rather challenging on a different day. Today is definitely not one of those days. And there’s still the second bottle waiting, with which I’ll hopefully someday find out how right I was today. I’m looking forward to it.