In Review…
The Fine Wine Experience Joh Jos. Prüm Finest and Rarest Wine Dinner with Katharina Prüm and Wilhelm Steifensand The Grand Hyatt, Hong Kong, 30th January 2015 © Linden Wilkie It’s been some years since I have had the privilege to taste such an array of rare Prüm wines, and my first chance to taste one from the 1930s. In some respects there is a sense of tasting wines that are ‘older’ or ‘younger’, but tasting blind I’m not sure how close I would get. Being out by decades in a guess would be easily possible even for an experienced taster. The wines evolve, and reward cellaring, yes, but the majority never seem to fade in the way that wines from other regions do. We are never quite left with just the furniture and no upholstery in the way we are elsewhere. The perception of residual sugar declines with bottle age (such that a kabinett or spätlese might taste only off-dry), yet the wines retain their natural balance. Balance is key here as it is anywhere, but the factors that limit have been for decades the opposite factors to those experienced in warmer climates. As we discussed 2003 and 1976 – different but both hot summers, Katharina Prüm offered her father’s maxim: “you will never have too little acidity in the Mosel”. That faith gets tested in vintages like 1959, 1976 and 2003, yet these are three great Prüm years, despite heatwaves. So long as phenolic ripeness is achieved, (as it was in all the wines we tasted tonight) longevity is assured through an elegant sort of intensity and great balance between fruitiness and acidity. To my taste, the less successful wines this evening were the Eisweins. The Mosel was cooler in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the ’61 and ’62 didn’t seem to offer anything extra through the risk and effort of picking the grape frozen in winter – they showed less coherence and balance, despite still being enjoyable. They are rare and expensive, and so I would always be on the look out for an older ‘feine’ or ‘feinste’ Auslese and put my money there rather than these older Eisweins. The same is not true today. Prüm’s current Eiswein offering – a 2002 Graacher Himmelreich Eiswein – is textbook balance and intensity, and delivers what Eiswein delivers best, razor sharp precision and purity. Where cellaring really seems to reward patience the most is in the auslese category where, in the absence of the bortrytis and dried fruit intensity of the higher prädikats like Beerenauslese and TBA, the wines need time to mellow and show their true level of nuance (much like Bordeaux or Burgundy). Great BA and TBA wines usually show rewardingly when young, and then hold (in my view) for decades, the great ones offering even more with age, but not always so. The Fine Wine Experience (HK) Ltd Room 402, 4/F, SBI Centre, 54-58 Des Voeux Road Central, Hong Kong S.A.R. Office +852 2230 4288 Email sales@finewineexperience.com Website: www.finewineexperience.com