Winemaker Spotlight: Johannes Selbach From Weingut Selbach Oster
Winebuzz.hk speaks to Johannes Selbach.
Winebuzz caught up with makers of fine Riesling winemaker, Johannes Selbach of Weingut Selbach-Oster. Johannes Selbach’s family have been producing wine for 410 years.
The Selbach-Oster vineyards are located on some of the best vineyard land in the heart of the Mosel wine country called ” Mittelmosel” (145 minutes due west of Frankfurt) where Reisling are grown on 20 hectares of steep, south-facing mountain slopes facing the Mosel River. The wine is produced completely by hand and varies from very dry to very sweet.
Winebuzz: What makes a great bottle of Riesling?
Johannes Selbach: A great Riesling is packed with flavour, shows very pure fruit and at the same time has refreshing acidity. A great Riesling should always entertain your palette with contrast of fruit and acid and come across as being elegant, never heavy, never clawing.
If you are a novice and you look for a Riesling, you will find a wine that has a delicate floral nose that engages your palette with a lot of inter-play between fruit and acid. Riesling is a grape that lives off a tension between two contrasting elements and the two contrasting elements are always fruit and acid. It’s a wine that is always vivid, always mouth-watering and never boring because it changes over time and will even change in the glass.
It’s easy to drink Riesling because of its light alcoholic package. Depending on the style of the wine, the dry is about 12.5%, off dry wines will be about 9% and sweet wines will be around 7%.
Winebuzz.hk: Do you employ any special techniques or processes to make your wine?
Johannes Selbach: Yes and no. It’s true that we need to pamper the wine and the fruit, making sure we have just the perfect fruit in terms of ripeness and healthiness. Then it’s the picking – we only pick the perfect fruit and discard those that are not perfect. The grapes require very gentle handling for pressing and processing. We don’t put any add-on into the wine so it’s a very pure wine – the better the raw ingredient the better the wine. There’s not much wine-making or technology involved in-between so it’s a very simplistic and puristic approach.”
Winebuzz: What’s your favourite bottle of Reisling?
Johannes Selbach: If it’s a hot summer day, I’ll go for a glass of refreshing white wine and I would opt for a Kabinett.
The winery produces a number of fine wines that Wine Spectator has given over 90 points;
- 2008 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Reisling Kabinett (91 Pts.)
- 2008 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Reisling Kabinett (90 Pts.)
- 2008 Selbach-Oster Reisling Spätlese (90 Pts.)
- 2008 Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Reisling Spätlese (90 Pts.)
- 2008 Reisling Eiswein Mosel Zeltinger Himmelreich (94 Pts.)
Where to buy?
- City Super, Times Square, Basement 1, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. Tel: 2506 2888
- Rare & Fine Wines Ltd, Shop B, G/F, The Putman, 202 Quee’s Road, Central, Hong Kong. Tel: 2815 6000
- Three Sixty, 3/F & 4/F The Landmark, Central, Hong Kong. Tel: 2111 4480
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