Selbach-Oster

  “Johannes Selbach, this estate's winemaker and director (as well as Terry Theise's man-on-the-ground in Germany) is on fire. His wines are top flight and yet his winemaking appears to be improving with each vintage. Readers should note that Selbach's wines typically appear substantially better after a few years of cellaring.” – Pierre Rovani, Wine Advocate

Good guy alert! This was one of the few estates to lower prices to help us offset the weakened Dollar. Johannes Selbach and I are the classic pair who agree 99.75% of the time and bicker endlessly about the other .25%! We’re also both eldest-children. We were also born in power-vintages, `53 for me and `59 for him. Mine was the elegant one, though, and his was the muscular one . . . . I tell you this because I don’t want to sound mawkish when I say I trust Johannes as I trust very few other people. He’s not only highly intelligent, he’s also smart and judicious. So when I asked him if a certain grower’s statement that 2002 was comparable to `71 was merely the usual early euphoria, he considered, smiled his gioconda smile, and said yes, it was.

“You may have noticed our wines are a bit drier the last two vintages than they used to be,” said Johannes Selbach. “We know how to make reductive fruit-bombs that get high scores and stand out in big tastings,” he continued, “but the problem is everyone writes about those wines but nobody drinks them. We want to make wines for food, that people can use in their everyday lives.”

The results are some of the deepest of all Mosel wines. They refuse to be merely aesthetic. They strive for (and often attain) a sine qua non of Mosel-ness. They take you through the gift-wrapping of mere flavor and they show you something you may not know how to see.