Bischel - Silvaner Bergen 2021
We are drinking a bottle of Silvaner Bergen 2021 from Weingut Bischel in Rheinhessen.
The summer review continues with a few wines from Rheinhessen. Or rather, first with one wine from Rheinhessen. At the already well-advanced Maxime Open Day 1, overlooking Nierstein, this Silvaner burned itself so deeply into memory that it now gets to open this small series. Mentally, one certainly associates Rheinhessen more with Riesling than with Silvaner, and Silvaner primarily with Franconia. Yet in Rheinhessen, depending on the source, there are about 400 hectares more Silvaner than in Franconia. To be fair, the total vineyard area is also four to five times larger than in Franconia, so the relative cultivation area is correspondingly smaller. However, this doesn’t detract from the fact that a lot is happening with Silvaner in Rheinhessen. The vineyard from which the grapes for the Silvaner Bergen come was bought by Weingut Bischel during the dissolution of Michael Teschke’s operation, who was particularly known for his Silvaner. I’ve never had a Silvaner from him in my glass, but I have had a wine that came from another dissolution, namely the last vintage of Von Racknitz, which was then sold as Landwein P. Sometimes one thing is connected to another, and where something ends, something new occasionally starts. The vines in the Silvaner vineyard were planted in the 60s, the grapes are aged in stainless steel and wood after some maceration time. The wine doesn’t appear on the winery’s homepage at all, in the current vintage I only find a Reserve without the name Bergen at a dealer. So I’m not quite sure if this wine will still or again be available, and I’ll keep an eye on the development.
Freshly uncorked, the Silvaner is a mixture of impenetrable structure and wood. The bottle at the Maxime Open must have been open for a bit longer. Very slowly, the thicket clears, revealing mandarin, tonic aromas, and salt. In the mouth, the wine is really juicy with little yellow fruit and significantly less structure than one might have suspected from smelling alone. And then comes length, length, length. It’s a lot. It was already a lot of wine in Rheinhessen, and so fresh it’s even a bit more. But, and this is the great art, it’s not even a bit strenuous. There’s multivitamin juice, creaminess, and pome fruit. I’m reassured once again that what was good there is also good here. I briefly regret only ordering one bottle, because this will certainly age magnificently. However, it doesn’t change the ever-present theme of lots of wine, limited liver. And so I’m glad that we discovered the wine there at all and look forward to the second evening.
This second evening starts unexpectedly harsh. There’s some hops, some wood, and uncomfortable roughness. At least until you have a sip of it in your mouth. There, the wine has become creamier, has this citrus fruit from really good natural (lemon shandy) and a touch of structure from the wood and the maceration time. In fact, this citrus fruit goes very well with the hops in the nose. And when the wine rests on the tongue, the harshness disappears. It’s still incredibly dense, tightly meshed, and intense. But it has also become finer overnight, perhaps a bit more open, fruity, if one can say that at all with this amount of structure. There’s again very briefly the regret about buying a single bottle. If this still smooths out over the years, the fruit comes out of its cave a bit more, the mildness of age sets in. This will certainly become really great. But somehow it already is, you just have to engage with it enough. If one were allowed to fill Silvaner as Grosses Gewächs in the VDP in Rheinhessen, this would be a hot candidate. But this is not allowed, because at the moment at least that’s reserved for Riesling and Pinot Noir. Towards the end of the evening, a nutty note comes into the wine and even more herbaceousness. Only the butter caramel from the July notes I don’t find here again. I don’t know how wise it was to start the Maxime review with this wine. It ruins any possible arc of suspense, because whatever follows, it won’t be able to get much better. But this is exactly why I love such events. Because I only had the Bischels on my radar for Riesling. And now they’re there for Silvaner too.