Wine Of The Month: A Springtime Riesling
Schloss Johannisberg
Hailing from Germany's Rheingau region, this single-vineyard Kabinett comes from a venerated winery where only Riesling has been cultivated since 1720, earning its claim as the first such winery in the world. Schloss Johannisberg translates to 'castle on St. John's Hill' so named for mentions of Johannisberg vineyards dating to 817 and then later, the site of a Benedictine monastery in the 1100s. By 1720, the entire domaine was planted with Riesling and it is marked as being the first closed (think cloistered) Riesling vineyard in the world. By 1971, after centuries of political and wartime conflict, as well as being coveted by royalty and heads of state, the domaine became an exclusive single vineyard.
Wine critic Robert Parker has called it 'one of the greatest Riesling terroirs on the planet wine.' And this year the UK industry magazine Drinks International called it on of its 'Most Admired Wine Brands for 2025.'
Vines are cultivated on 50 hectares, on a quartzite hill in front of the Taunus mountains, south-facing on a 45-degree slope (steep!). The weather here is so fair that when the sun is out, says managing director Stefan Doktor, 'we can play volleyball until 10 p.m.' Otherwise, he says the terroir is 'fine and unique, giving a clear definition of the wine.'
The 2022 Rotlack Kabinett is a very refined expression with that clarity of fruit and unhampered by any manipulation. Only 20 percent is aged in wooden barrels, produced from the domaine's own oak trees, and the wine is further softened by five months on the lees. The nose is marked by tangy lime, peaches and a bit of welcome petrol—just enough to let you know this is the real deal—as well as ripe stone fruit such as peaches. The palate is slightly off dry. Kabinett is made from fully ripened grapes and is the least sweet (or most dry) of the four levels in the Prädikat scale (the domaine web site includes a helpful color-coded schematic for understanding its quality levels here). The Schloss Johannisberg Kabinett deftly balances the sweetness of ripe fleshy fruit with acid and structure to deliver a finely finessed wine that, despite that refinement, shows energy and intensity. It is fresh, lithe and adaptable to many spring and summer meals, espcially now with those tender green shoots in the market. Or, it's highly drinkable on its own. And, at 11% abv, you can drink all day (but drink responsibly, of course!)
Fun fact: At the heart of the winery is the 'Bibliotheca Subterranea,' holding about 25,000 bottles in the 900-year-old abbey cellar. The oldest is from 1748.
Doktor noted that Thomas Jefferson once visited the winery in 1793 and though he had a good impression of the wine, noted they were too expensive to buy. You can have this bottle for around $49.
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Forbes
19-07-2025
- Forbes
Global Missions With Monks Led Adventurer Into Wild World Of Whiskey
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San Francisco Chronicle
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- San Francisco Chronicle
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Veins of it run through various parts of Napa Valley (and Sonoma County's Chalk Hill region has a lot of it), but it's rare in Napa to find the accumulation that's at White Rock. The soil's low nutrient levels cause the vines to struggle, resulting in small berries and concentrated flavors. The Vandendriessches planted the Napa standards of Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and other red Bordeaux grapes. In 1987, they used a coal mining machine to bore into the hillside for subterranean caves, one in a wave of new cave construction that was underway in Napa Valley at the time. Henri and Claire's sons, Michael and Christopher, started working for the family business early; as teenagers, the brothers planted an entire new section of the vineyard. After attending school and working other jobs, they both returned to White Rock full time: Michael as vineyard manager in 1996, Christopher as winemaker in 1999. Christopher was fresh off a stint as the assistant winemaker at Luna Vineyards, where his boss was John Kongsgaard, famous for his indulgent, dense Chardonnays. 'I came out of the Kongsgaard school of winemaking,' Christopher said. 'We were definitely making big, robust wines on the edge of extraction. I felt back then that that was the truest way of expressing the terroir, to get as much as possible out of the grapes.' But as Christopher learned the White Rock vineyard more deeply, he began to feel that this site's terroir could be best revealed by a lighter winemaking touch. 'White Rock's grapes don't need to be overextracted to have an expression that's unique,' he said. Gradually, he has taken to fermenting the wines at cooler temperatures in an effort to draw out less oomph. 'Each wine for me is like finding a piece of driftwood on the beach, and I'm trying to figure out how to make it into a piece of art,' he said. 'It's its own strange form, and my job is to do as little as possible.' The wines are 'understated, which is really endearing to the people who love them,' said Kelli White, the author of 'Napa Valley, Then and Now' and director of education at the Wine Center at Meadowood, 'but also potentially means they get left behind in certain critical roundups.' Unfailingly, the White Rock wines 'are really ageworthy,' White said. 'They never did the chasing-high-alcohol thing. They never did the 200% new oak thing.' They also never chased the $300 Cabernet thing: White Rock's Claret is $65, and its estate Chardonnay $45, much lower than Napa wines of comparable quality. That ageworthiness comes largely from the breccia, which imbues White Rock's red wines with a formidable tannin. Christopher embraces that rusticity, rather than trying to melt it into the silky, soft tannins that are a signature of Napa's modern-day Cabernet style. He also ages the wines for much longer than is typical before selling: at least three years for the whites, and up to five years for the reds. Rather than send them to a warehouse where he can't fully control the ambiance, Christopher installed sparkling-wine cages in corners of the caves, in which he (now with the help of assistant winemaker Libby Foulk) tightly stacks hundreds of bottles, then labels them by hand when he's ready to sell them. When I joined the Chronicle in 2015, White Rock was one of the first Napa wineries I visited in my new role; another winemaker had tipped me off to it. It looked so different from the other glitzy estates I was seeing, so much more modest and earnest. Just a family, a few employees and a cave. I appreciated that the wines seemed like an expression of that restraint. 'Herbs, eucalyptus, dusty cocoa, black tea. LOVE,' I wrote in my notebook of a 2011 Cabernet. That visit informed several stories I wrote, including one about the pyrazine controversy in Napa, but I never wrote a dedicated story about White Rock. I guess I couldn't find a news hook. Two years later, there was all too much of a news hook. In October 2017, the Atlas fire tore through White Rock, and the family fled quickly. When they returned, they found that Henri and Claire's house — the winery that Dr. Pettingill had built — had partially burned, and a large section of the cave was rubble. The fire destroyed 800 cases of library wine in the cave, as well as 8,000 bottles in the original barrel cellar at the house. I drove past the evacuation-zone lines to report on the damage. It was heartbreaking to see thousands of charred, broken bottles of wine lying in heaps, and a house reduced to a pile of debris with only a chimney still standing. Over the phone, the family recounted to me their harrowing exit. When I returned this spring, the Vandendriessches had just broken ground on the portion of the cave that they're rebuilding. It took them nearly eight years to secure the plans and permits, but by next spring they expect to be finished with the construction, which will include a new tasting room. In the meantime, they've been hosting customers in an air-conditioned trailer and at a picnic table underneath the towering live oak in the vineyard. Engineers were able to salvage the original stone siding on Henri and Claire's house, replacing the mortar block by block and sandblasting to remove blackening. The intervening years have brought other changes. White Rock's vineyards achieved organic certification this year. Although it was merely a codification of practices they'd always had in place — the vineyard has never been treated with pesticides or herbicides — an employee with experience in grant writing finally had the bandwidth for the paperwork. The winery, too, is undergoing organic certification, a separate process that regulates materials including cleaning solutions and yeast nutrients. White Rock also implemented an unorthodox approach to releasing wines to its mailing list. Every six months, the team tastes through a range of older and younger vintages to determine which are at their peak, then sells an assortment of those regardless of their age. The current release includes reds from 2013 and 2014 as well as 2014 and 2018 Chardonnays. (The White Rock wines currently available at restaurants and wine shops, on the other hand, are from the 2022 vintage.) Customers love it, Christopher said: 'When they hear that they can buy a wine that was perfectly aged in a cave for 10 years, they're really excited.' Christopher has increased his driftwood art collection. When I visited him a decade ago, he produced around eight wines a year; he now makes upwards of 15. 'I've become obsessed with single-tank wines,' he said, and now has a series of small-lot bottlings. He added a Champagne -method wine in 2019, White Rock's first foray into sparkling. But these shifts are not fundamental. For the most part, White Rock remains charmingly the same. A taste of its jasmine flower-inflected Breccia Chardonnay, its mint- and sage-forward Merlot or its licoricey, herbal Claret makes it clear: These wines are timeless.
