- March 1, 2013
Dr. L 2011
- by Lars Carlberg
On a visit to my parents' home in San Antonio, Texas, I selected a bottle of 2011 Riesling "Dr. L" at the Central Market on Broadway, located in Alamo Heights. To my surprise, the wine tasted really good. I've never had this popular and widely distributed Mosel Riesling before.
In past years, I haven't always been impressed by some of the wines that I've tasted from Dr. Loosen, even though the estate was, without question, one of the top producers in the early to mid-nineties and is still well respected today. Back then, Ernst ("Ernie") Loosen took over his family's property and was a forerunner for bringing new energy to the region. Stuart Pigott, who, at the time, became one of the leading wine writers on German Riesling, backed Ernie's wines as well. To be fair, I haven't tasted the last few vintages from Dr. Loosen, which surely made some very good wines.
In addition, Ernie is an astute businessman, who runs his own US import business (Loosen Bros. USA), and is a tireless promoter of German Riesling as well as one of the Mosel's most important ambassadors, along with Johannes Selbach of Selbach-Oster. Like Johannes, Ernie regularly travels around the globe and is also a vocal opponent of the controversial Hochmosel Bridge (High Mosel Bridge), as is Katharina Prüm of Joh. Jos. Prüm, who travels a lot herself.
Dr. Loosen has significantly expanded its production over the years, too. The wines are now vinified in a large, modern facility in Wittlich, a town located in the Eifel away from the Mosel River. In some ways, Loosen is similar to Leitz in the Rheingau. Each has become a major producer for their respective regions. Ernie owns J.L Wolf in the Mittelhaardt (Pfalz) as well.
I liked the Dr. L 2011 better than Leitz's Eins-Zwei-Dry 2010, which was also purchased at Central Market and is a basic dry Riesling from one of the Rheingau's best producers. Eins-Zwei-Dry 2010 had a rather golden hue and didn't have either the finesse or liveliness of the Mosel Riesling. In contrast, the Dr. L 2011 was classic Mosel—pale, light, and pleasing to drink.
"Dr. L is our introductory Riesling from Dr. Loosen. The fruit is sourced from contracted growers throughout the Mosel region, including the Saar," says Kirk Wille, Vice President of Loosen Bros. USA Ltd.
It should be noted, too, that Kirk and his friend Peter Liem, who focuses on champagne and sherry now, published a bi-monthly electronic magazine called Riesling Report from 2000–2002. Although publication has discontinued, the complete library of 17 back issues can be purchased on CD-ROM.
Kirk went on to say that Dr. L is 100 percent Riesling from steep slate slopes. It's produced in the so-called classic fruity style of the Mosel, that is, with a bit of sweetness. "The idea of it is to be an affordable ambassador for the region, capturing the bright fruit and brisk acidity that are typical of Mosel Rieslings," Kirk says. "I often refer to it as our 'welcome to the Mosel' Riesling."
The 2011 vintage pulls it off quite well. The wine is light-bodied, invigorating, and more dry than sweet. Kirk says:
It is not an estate wine, so it is bottled under the Loosen Bros. company name. Ernst Loosen and his brother, Thomas, require a rather high level of quality (both in terms of ripeness and fruit health) from the growers, or the fruit is rejected. Vinification is very straight-forward: immediate pressing; natural settling of the must; cool fermentation, all done in stainless steel, and stopped by chilling (Süssreserve is never used); racking from the lees and then a light filtration before bottling.
The grapes for Dr. L come from different parts of the Mosel region, including the Lower Mosel and the Saar (mentioned above). Kirk says that this "enables Ernst to maintain a fairly consistent style with the blending, although the character of each vintage definitely expresses itself." He adds, "Ernst says that doing a great job with a blended wine of this volume is in some ways much more difficult than producing a great single-vineyard, estate-grown Spätlese."
In explaining the creation of Dr. L, Kirk gives the following explanation:
The Loosens launched this wine in 1995, at the request of their UK importer who wanted a Mosel Riesling with a very simple label. So Ernst stripped the front label down to the brand name, the variety and the vintage. You can’t get much simpler than that! Since then, the wine has become quite popular in export markets (there is also a trocken version for the German domestic market), and the production now exceeds 100,000 cases.
Indeed, the wine has a tastefully done ribbed-paper label with an informative back label and comes in a stylish 330-mm antique-blue Schlegel bottle topped with a screwcap.
Besides The Austin Wine Merchant on West Sixth Street in Austin, the selection of German Rieslings at the shops and stores (including a Whole Foods in San Antonio) that I visited this time around was rather disappointing. Most places had inexpensive Mosel offerings from the same bulk shippers and few selections from small growers. If you do come across Dr. L 2011, however, please don't hesitate to buy a bottle of this entry-level Mosel Riesling. It's a very good vintage of this wine, which has an excellent quality-price rapport. ♦
- Posted in Articles, Wines
- | Tagged: Dr. Loosen
This is a very helpful report, Lars. In the expensive New England market, Dr. L is positioned between bulk-shipped wine with little orientation towards quality and the more serious single-vineyard wines. Seems to be a gamble each vintage, but i’m very happy to read that the 2011 wine turned out well.
Thanks, Kevin. As I wrote in my article, I was pleasantly surprised how good the Dr. L 2011 tasted.
Important wine growers becoming involved in the parallel production of high-volume entry-level wines is a trend that can be cheered … though with caveats. In some instances, it’s clear that the talents of a grower in working with modest volumes of fruit from sites with which he or she is on intimate terms doesn’t translate into aesthetic success with high volumes, purchased fruit, and other people’s vineyards. Another frequent problem is that some growers cannot exercise sufficient control over or be sufficiently selective in their choice of raw materials. And there is also the important practical difficulty of blending on a scale too-large to physically fit within the cellars of most top-flight growers. Thus, for instance, Leitz – until a new estate cellar was completed two years ago – had to rent space for the production of his less expensive wines; and Christian and Andrea Ebert of Schloß Saarstein were for some years compelled to bottle their entry-level Rieslings as “Kellereiabfüllungen” because of the need for a large outside facility in which to blend and bottle.
Speaking of Eberts’ intro-level Rieslings, they typically represent fine value (though their U.S. importer appears to offer only the off-dry not the dry bottling) as well as a special sort of care and integrity. The fruit comes from growers whose properties either adjoin or are within a few hundred yards of adjoining Schloß Saarstein’s acreage, so Ebert can literally over-see them from his balcony. What’s more, the growers all collaborate and coordinate their viticultural regimens closely with him, permitting all parties as well as the ultimate consumer to benefit from efficiencies of scale. The dry 2010 and 2011 versions (in liter bottles, no less!) are especially fine and almost ridiculously under-priced. All this praise aside, though, you should not need Christian Ebert to tell you (though he will ; -) that there is barely enough return on this wine to make it all work, and he is constantly treading an exceedingly fine bottom line pressured by his trade customers including restaurateur not to exceed their notion of an optimum price point. It’s a problem that exists world-wide, of course. And there are some genres (Austrian Grüner Veltliner a prominent example) in which despite the presence of many truly outstanding values either from less-prestigious growers and regions or from world-renowned growers operating as micro-négociants so as to render a high-volume entry-level bottling, I have the distinct impression of a wine assortment being increasingly aesthetically dumbed-down as price point trumps taste in the decisions of merchants and restaurateurs and cuvées largely devoid of character – whether or not associated with well-known or well-reputed growers – increasingly infiltrate the market.
Naturally there are some growers who manage to produce outstanding entry-level wines in high volume entirely from estate fruit. Zilliken, for example, has had outstanding aesthetic as well as commercial success with his “Butterfly” Riesling, even if this isn’t a brand that can be compared in volume to Dr. L. or Eins-Zwei-Dry. And speaking of Zilliken, I can’t help but point out that his “Butterfly” is at last no longer the stylistic anomaly that it was over the first decade of its existence – and not because its style has changed, but rather because the rest of the Zilliken line-up now includes some halbtrocken or stylistically (for lack of a better word) “feinherb” wines, whereas for nearly three decades it consisted of a tiny volume (usually just one bottling) of legally trocken wine and the rest unabashedly (often astonishingly considering their uncanny balance!) sweet. In offering Rieslings with an increasingly broad range of residual sugar as opposed to insisting “Riesling must be either legally dry or truly sweet,” Zillikens – like many their Saar neighbors – are bucking the (schizoid) German-wide trend.
What a great comment, David. But that’s nothing new really, especially with your recent replies to Kevin Goldberg’s article and my long-winded piece on Kabinett. If I had a lot of money, you’d be hired as the main editor, as I still have no one. In fact, we’d have to change the name of my site.
I’ve heard about Leitz having had to rent extra space, but didn’t know about Schloss Saarstein’s “Kellereiabfüllungen.” My last visit there was with you a few years ago. I need to get back and taste their wines again, especially the dry liter bottling. Ulli Stein is a fan of their wines. Their styles are somewhat similar. As you mention, many growers talk about the problem of making money with their entry-level wine. For example, Weiser-Künstler was using fruit from their own labor-intensive terraced plots in Ellergrub and Gaispfad and probably underselling themselves. Now, they have purchased fruit from old vines. Gernot Kollmann does the same for his “basic” C.A.I. and has also made the same point. He asks himself how long can this continue to work, as the grape-growers farming steep, old-vine parcels won’t always be there. Stefan Steinmetz of Günther Steinmetz makes excellent entry-level liter offerings from his own holdings, but earns little money from these low-margin wines.
As for Zilliken’s Butterfly, I like that it’s also vinified and aged in cask, like the rest of their wines.
Kollmann’s doing something at (the “new”) Immich-Batterieberg rather different from nearly any other top-notch grower I can think of, namely rendering an entry level-wine that shares with the estate wines solely a sense of style and high stardard of quality, but that otherwise brings together local non-estate fruit with fruit from as far afield as the Saar. (Details can be found in the profile of the estate on this site.) Interestingly, even Molitor with his enormous and far-flung holdings on Mosel and Saar sticks pretty close to his “home” vineyard (i.e. where his winery’s located) of Wehlener Klosterberg for his generic bottlings (appropriately named “Haus Klosterberg”).
There are certainly many growers who utilize fruit from just two or three nearby vineyards for generic bottlings and in some instances (particularly at large and geographically sprawling Rheingau estates, Schönborn a consistently successful example) there are generic estate bottlings that incorporate fruit from communes widely geographically, geologically, and micro-climatically disparate. But when it comes to this sort of diversity in a negociant project that’s affiliate with an estate, I can’t think of examples other than Immich-Batterieberg … and of course Loosen with the wine originally under discussion, though it is rendered in much larger volume; designed to fit a very different market niche; and not comparable in quality to the Immich-Batterieberg “C.A.I.” You might be tempted to say that a wine like this (let alone the diverse Immich-Batterieberg blend) isn’t a “wine of terroir,” and I sympathize. But in a very broad sense the wines are still about Riesling on Slate in the larger Mosel basin. And anyway, they don’t have to be less distinctively delicious or complex just for having been blended across a wide geographical range.
Nik Weis’s outstanding value “Urban Riesling” is an interesting case: sourced entirely from Mehring where he has close connections with growers through his wife, a native of that village (geologically fascinating and capable of correspondingly highly distinct Riesling). Weis’s Sankt Urbans-Hof also bottles an estate generic which straddles Saar as well as Mosel, though I’m pretty sure that characteristically the same two sources (Wiltinger Schlangengraben and Leiwener Klostergarten) are utilized.
Perhaps it involves too much peeking behind the curtain for either Ernie Loosen’s or Nik Weis’s tastes, but dare I suggest that a profile of the growers behind Dr. L and/or Urban Riesling has the makings of a fascinating article?
That’s a great idea, Dan. Julian Haart said that the Riesling grapes from his steep, well-placed parcel in Wintricher Ohligsberg, before he took over, were once blended into Dr. L. I wonder how much Ernie Loosen paid the former grower for his grapes in this prime site.
Hi Lars –
Thank you for the interesting article. I haven’t tried the Dr. L Riesling for a few years now – the last vintage that I had was the 2007. Anyway, I do recall the 2005 in particular being quite good for the price. The 2011 sounds like it is definitely worth trying.
You’re welcome, Andrew. I had the 2011 Dr. L Riesling only once, but it tasted very good.
This is all very interesting to read since I am in the US for 2 weeks and my travels made me think a lot about the entry level wines of the more prestigious Mosel producers. So far I had many opportunities to look at the German Riesling sections in many different shops and markets (Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and to come Florida and Illinois) – all with very different levels of wine “sophistication”. It is very true that Dr. Loosen stands next to the true horror labels of German mass wine suppliers in screaming blue bottles. First of all: great that Dr. Loosen successfully competes with those. But how this works and if it does any good to the brand I don’t know. What I observe is that Sommeliers of fine dining restaurants do not like it anymore to have by the glass since it is all over the place plus in a doubtful category. Some shop owners put it also in their head in the same category as the other “generic” cheap Rieslings – which I find very sad. But maybe it is part of Loosens business model…and then it is fine (Lars you can interview him and find out ;-)). The best would of course be that it is recommended to younger people who do not have a lot of money yet as the entrance to the great world of Mosel Riesling and I am sure that this here and there happens.
I don’t think it is realistic to compare entry level Rieslings from Loosen, Molitor, Zilliken or Saarstein. The volumes and approaches are too different. The price point of Dr. L is quite shocking to me because it is said to come from steep slopes. (I have seen it from 9-11 Dollars).Luckily Lars discovered it to taste good.
I figure this can only be justified by the quantity made and maybe because Loosen can leave out one margin step since he has his own import business. Having worked over 8 years as the right hand of Markus Molitor after my training as enologist and viticultural engeneer, I know that his entry level Riesling for the US was always Estate bottled and should it be until today since the national importer Schmitt Sohne requests from the premium estates that they import that all wines brought into the US to be Estate bottled which makes a lot of sense in my eyes (By the way: The name of the Molitor entry level “Haus Klosterberg” is no indication for the vineyard Wehlener Klosterberg, grapes can come from anywhere, also from Saar and if for non estate bottled also frm Ruwer. Haus Klosterberg referes to the winery building, actually the winery was called Haus Klosterberg when Markus took over from his father end of the 80s.). Outside of the U.S. the wine is in most vintages non Estate bottled.
And yes, wineries can earn money with their entry level wines, of course not in the price range of Dr. L, but if it ends up around 17-19 Dollars in the shelf they are doing well – of course they should pick the grapes in fair amounts in vineyards that can be worked in with normal machines (Direktzuglagen) or are in any other way a bit less work intensive and it is important to manage the quantities and the ripeness levels – why risking to end up at Auslese levels because the weather holds up with a lot of sunshine? Here I am missing sometimes more strategic approaches in the vineyards to pick grapes that suit the portfolio that a winery needs and they are many variables that can be played to obtain grapes with low potential alcohol but yet physiologically ripe(timing, selection process, quantity, leaf management, plant protection, genetic material and many more). And if there are no suitable vineyards owned grapes can be sourced and more steep slopes be saved from not being cultivated anymore.
I am actually very much pro grape sourcing for the entry level wines because of the above even though at Bischöfliche Weingüter Trier and Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium we have enough to play with from our 130 hectares and are not sourcing grapes. Plus we are extremely lucky to have big connected properties in the not really steep Eitelsbacher Marienholz (20 hectares) and Falkensteiner Hofberg (10 hectares) for our QBA levels. But of course there are wineries you own purely steep vineyards and sometimes with eytremely old vines so where to source the grapes for the basic entry level? For the whole region and especially the outcome of vineyard owners who would not bottle their juice themselves it is very attractive to sell the grapes to all the successfull producers since they can get 30-80% (depending on vintage and available quantities) more for one Liter than if they would sell it on the anonymous general market as juice or bring it to the cooperative. The nice side effect is also that they can be proud of what was made out of their grapes. Vive la Moselle!
Anna, I appreciate your long reply. You bring up some very good points. I should interview Ernie Loosen and need to profile his estate anyway. Thanks for clarifying the details on Markus Molitor’s entry-level Riesling Haus Klosterberg. Markus makes excellent wines from top to bottom.
I agree with you on the importance of entry-level wines and how sourcing from grape-growers can benefit both if the price paid for the grapes is fair. Ulli Stein, who makes an excellent liter bottling and Blauschiefer feinherb (trocken for the States thanks to Doug Polaner!), likes to highlight this point, especially in his manifesto from a few years ago.
At Bischöfliche Weingüter Trier and Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnausium, you have great potential to make superb entry-level Rieslings. For example, I really liked FWG’s 2012 Schiefer trocken (Falkensteiner Hofberg).