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Schafer-Frohlich

2008 Schafer-Frohlich, Monzinger Halenberg Riesling GG, Nahe 1.5L

Germany Riesling Nahe 1.5L

Wine Advocate

93

Vinous

93
/
2008 Schafer-Frohlich, Monzinger Halenberg Riesling GG, Nahe 1.5L
Schafer-Frohlich

2008 Schafer-Frohlich, Monzinger Halenberg Riesling GG, Nahe 1.5L

Germany Riesling Nahe 1.5L

Wine Advocate

93

Vinous

93
/

Halenberg is rich with Blue slate, gravel and quartz soils, providing a definite flintiness to the wines and a stunning texture & length.

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The classic story - a 2-century old family vineyard finally finds the right hands in the 9th generation. Tim Fröhlich made his first vintage in 1995 and has since been held as one of the greatest winemaking talents in Germany, regularly creating wines of both density and energy.

Schafer-Frohlich

The Nahe is home to some famous German estates but Schafer-Fröhlich is tops among them, counting among their 21 hectares of vines the famous Felseneck, Kupfergrube and Felsenberg. As with so many classic German estates, the slopes of these vineyards are so intense that everything must be harvested by hand, resulting in a rigorous selection process of tiny grapes that intensify the flavors and quality of his six GG wines.

Since he ascended to the winemaking seat in 1995, Tim made some smart trades and acquisitions of land, increasing his family's holdings to include a fine palate of vineyard and soil types; Felseneck's quartzite soils provide an elegant, defined wine. Felsenberg and Kupfergrube have volcanic influences, providing richness and more spiced mineral tones; Halenberg's blue slate and Frühlingsplätzchen's red slate offer unique, more crystalline qualities, in their own right top Grand Crus of the Nahe.

Tim's strengths are clear in poor or hot vintages, as he is quite adept in managing his vineyard to weather the varied storms; his wines are consistently stunning in quality, be they of rainy vintages like 2014 or hot as in 2018. Without a doubt, some of Germany's best wines come from this estate every single year.

Meet the Producer

Schafer-Frohlich

The classic story - a 2-century old family vineyard finally finds the right hands in the 9th generation. Tim Fröhlich made his first vintage in 1995 and has since been held as one of the greatest winemaking talents in Germany, regularly creating wines of both density and energy.

The Nahe is home to some famous German estates but Schafer-Fröhlich is tops among them, counting among their 21 hectares of vines the famous Felseneck, Kupfergrube and Felsenberg. As with so many classic German estates, the slopes of these vineyards are so intense that everything must be harvested by hand, resulting in a rigorous selection process of tiny grapes that intensify the flavors and quality of his six GG wines.

Since he ascended to the winemaking seat in 1995, Tim made some smart trades and acquisitions of land, increasing his family's holdings to include a fine palate of vineyard and soil types; Felseneck's quartzite soils provide an elegant, defined wine. Felsenberg and Kupfergrube have volcanic influences, providing richness and more spiced mineral tones; Halenberg's blue slate and Frühlingsplätzchen's red slate offer unique, more crystalline qualities, in their own right top Grand Crus of the Nahe.

Tim's strengths are clear in poor or hot vintages, as he is quite adept in managing his vineyard to weather the varied storms; his wines are consistently stunning in quality, be they of rainy vintages like 2014 or hot as in 2018. Without a doubt, some of Germany's best wines come from this estate every single year.

The Wine Advocate

Wine Advocate

93

Red raspberry and red currant – accompanied by fennel and tarragon – in the nose of the Schafer-Frohlich 2008 Monzinger Halenberg Riesling Grosses Gewachs portend a correspondingly bright, tart palate display in which lime, grapefruit, and salt join the red berries. Intriguing suggestions of green tea and quarry dust well up as this opens to the air. It’s hard to imagine a wine that would compel you to smack your lips louder than does this one, its mineral and citrus serving for ticklish invigoration and sensations of citrus zest, salt, and stone clinging like a palpable residue you can’t scrape off. It’s at the stylistic opposite end from those many outstanding wines of its vintage that coat the palate soothingly. This electrifies. It’s one of those high-extract, capital M mineral wines to which it’s a compliment to ask for a water chaser. Plan on following it for a decade, and hopefully it will prove eloquent even beyond that. I have devoted a lot of attention to the wines of the Frohlich family and the emergence of Tim Frohlich as one of Germany’s star wine makers (see for instance my accounts in issues 161 and 167), and by now I am surely not the only wine writer to be almost tapped-out of superlatives. But the hits just keep coming, and the 2008 vintage Schafer-Frohlich collection represents another amazing achievement. Tim Frohlich keeps finding new ways to push the qualitative envelope, and in 2008 one of them was through sheer delay of harvest, which didn’t really get going here until the first of November and, according to his account, “went on for 27 uninterrupted days. I won’t try to tell you that we were never nervous about this approach,” he added wryly, “but in all that time we didn’t lose any acidity or freshness in the wines, they remained perfectly brilliant.” Indeed, the effects of such long hang time incorporate phenomenal levels of concentration but – as far as I am able to report – harbored no down-sides. (Quantity was another matter: the crop was small even by this estate’s recent standards.) Frohlich believes that such extended hang time – even when the foliage has fallen and concentration is largely via dehydration – pays dividends of complexity and elegance in small-berried, low yielding Riesling vines, and it’s precisely grapes of this sort than inform his Grosse Gewachse. While nobly sweet wines were (as my tasting notes explain) more oriented toward block picking than classic selection this year, that does not mean there was less work on the sorting tables. On the contrary, Frohlich reports that the effects of sporadic esca (a fungal disease increasingly pernicious in California as well as Europe that leaves afflicted portions of bunches hard to identify until you handle or taste them) kept his team up until 2 and 3 many mornings. Meanwhile, each year we just keep lengthening and widening the tables and putting on more people, he remarked in a tone of resignation. Stringent control of temperature in the numerous compartments of his cellar; re-apportionment of lees; plus selective and judicious use of cultured yeasts (it seems like yesterday when Frohlich first experimented with spontaneous fermentations, but now they represent the rule here) enabled him to achieve the volumetric majority of trocken wine that his German market demands. Incidentally, the Frohlichs have continued to add prime acreage in Bockenau on top of the major investments made several years ago in Schlossbockelheimer Felsenberg and Monzinger Halenberg and Fruhlingsplatzchen, so that virtually 100% of their wine – including generic bottlings – now comes from estate fruit.

Vinous

Vinous

93

Flamboyantly rich aromas of nectarine, honeysuckle and anise seed. Downright chewy in texture, with apricot fruit and wet stone minerality nicely interwoven. With its superb purity, depth and very complex finish, this dry riesling is just beginning to show its potential.

What the Critics are Saying

The Wine Advocate

Wine Advocate

93

Red raspberry and red currant – accompanied by fennel and tarragon – in the nose of the Schafer-Frohlich 2008 Monzinger Halenberg Riesling Grosses Gewachs portend a correspondingly bright, tart palate display in which lime, grapefruit, and salt join the red berries. Intriguing suggestions of green tea and quarry dust well up as this opens to the air. It’s hard to imagine a wine that would compel you to smack your lips louder than does this one, its mineral and citrus serving for ticklish invigoration and sensations of citrus zest, salt, and stone clinging like a palpable residue you can’t scrape off. It’s at the stylistic opposite end from those many outstanding wines of its vintage that coat the palate soothingly. This electrifies. It’s one of those high-extract, capital M mineral wines to which it’s a compliment to ask for a water chaser. Plan on following it for a decade, and hopefully it will prove eloquent even beyond that. I have devoted a lot of attention to the wines of the Frohlich family and the emergence of Tim Frohlich as one of Germany’s star wine makers (see for instance my accounts in issues 161 and 167), and by now I am surely not the only wine writer to be almost tapped-out of superlatives. But the hits just keep coming, and the 2008 vintage Schafer-Frohlich collection represents another amazing achievement. Tim Frohlich keeps finding new ways to push the qualitative envelope, and in 2008 one of them was through sheer delay of harvest, which didn’t really get going here until the first of November and, according to his account, “went on for 27 uninterrupted days. I won’t try to tell you that we were never nervous about this approach,” he added wryly, “but in all that time we didn’t lose any acidity or freshness in the wines, they remained perfectly brilliant.” Indeed, the effects of such long hang time incorporate phenomenal levels of concentration but – as far as I am able to report – harbored no down-sides. (Quantity was another matter: the crop was small even by this estate’s recent standards.) Frohlich believes that such extended hang time – even when the foliage has fallen and concentration is largely via dehydration – pays dividends of complexity and elegance in small-berried, low yielding Riesling vines, and it’s precisely grapes of this sort than inform his Grosse Gewachse. While nobly sweet wines were (as my tasting notes explain) more oriented toward block picking than classic selection this year, that does not mean there was less work on the sorting tables. On the contrary, Frohlich reports that the effects of sporadic esca (a fungal disease increasingly pernicious in California as well as Europe that leaves afflicted portions of bunches hard to identify until you handle or taste them) kept his team up until 2 and 3 many mornings. Meanwhile, each year we just keep lengthening and widening the tables and putting on more people, he remarked in a tone of resignation. Stringent control of temperature in the numerous compartments of his cellar; re-apportionment of lees; plus selective and judicious use of cultured yeasts (it seems like yesterday when Frohlich first experimented with spontaneous fermentations, but now they represent the rule here) enabled him to achieve the volumetric majority of trocken wine that his German market demands. Incidentally, the Frohlichs have continued to add prime acreage in Bockenau on top of the major investments made several years ago in Schlossbockelheimer Felsenberg and Monzinger Halenberg and Fruhlingsplatzchen, so that virtually 100% of their wine – including generic bottlings – now comes from estate fruit.

Vinous

Vinous

93

Flamboyantly rich aromas of nectarine, honeysuckle and anise seed. Downright chewy in texture, with apricot fruit and wet stone minerality nicely interwoven. With its superb purity, depth and very complex finish, this dry riesling is just beginning to show its potential.