New from the Nahe: Von Racknitz
3/19/13 -
(Huge chunks of Porphyr in the Niederhäuser Klamm)
Today we're happy to introduce Weingut Von Racknitz, a Nahe producer that has never before been sold in the United States. Winemaking here goes back a very, very long time; a monastery was founded here in the 6th century and monks likely planted vines in the 11th. It's been in the Von Racknitz family since 1753 and operating since 2003 in its current incarnation, under Louise Von Racknitz-Adams and Matthias Adams.
As soon as we heard about the wines, we knew we would want to work with them. A near-organic estate in the Nahe with choice vineyards and a minimalist cellar ethos? Sign us up! Matthias and Louise run in the same circles as some of our absolute favorites (they're good friends with Clemens and Rita Busch and we tasted the wines for the first time when Gernot Kollman hosted us all for dinner last May at Immich-Batterieberg). It's taken longer than we would have hoped to get the wines here but now they're in New York and we couldn't be happier.
Their main vineyard, the Disibodenberg, is a terraced slope just below the estate. They've also been buying up choice sites around the rest of the central Nahe, in such beloved villages as Niederhäusen, Schlossbockelheim, Oberhausen and Traisen (any of these sound familiar?) Picture the pretty, exotic wines you may know from the Nahe, a coolish region with a multitude of different soil types, (volcanic rock, loess and slate are all common here in combinations not found elsewhere); imagine those same wines raised in the non-interventionist manner similar to that of someone like Clemens Busch, and you start to get an idea what these wines are all about.
Each of the four wines we've brought in are dry Rieslings and we decided to offer a number of different vintages to paint a more comprehensive picture of the house style. There's an estate trocken, two multi-vineyard wines that are bottled based on soil type (either slate or volcanic rock) and a single-vineyard wine from the Niederhäuser Klamm. Naturally, we recommend you try one of each. -jfr
