2007 Villa Wolf Forster Pechstein Riesling Library Release

Viticulture

The Pechstein vineyard, in the neighbouring village of Forst, has the most assertive minerality of all the Villa Wolf Estate vineyards. The name translates as “tar stone” and refers to the abundance of black basalt in the soil, which gives the wines a firm mineral edge. At Villa Wolf, Ernst Loosen uses a three tier, Burgundian-style vineyard classification, based on an 1828 Bavarian tax assessment map of the Pfalz.

The 2007 vintage was one with clean and healthy fruit, excellent ripeness and superb acidity. Even early on the wines showed great intensity and purity, with excellent acidity balanced by enormous fruit. The rainy weather in spring and summer was a big help and we avoided the drought issues that we had faced the previous two vintages. We were back to a much more normal crop size, so quantities of most of the wines is much better this year. The only exceptions were a few parcels in Wachenheim and Forst that are still recovering from hail damage that occurred in June of 2006. We got some nice fruit from those vines, but the yields were quite low. We were extremely happy with the quality — and the quantity — of the whole range of wines in 2007. It was an unusual growing season that started out rather too early for comfort, but ended up balancing itself out and giving us some truly amazing wines. This Library Release is an amazing opportunity to experience how this fantastic vintage is showing all these years later.