TN: 2002 JJ Prum Graacher Himmelreich Spatlese - meh

Well, this is a disappointment. I’m on day 3 of this bottle, and it’s still kind of one-dimensional.

Fantastic structure – concentrated, with bracing acid, but little flavor interest. A trace of honey but no very distinct fruit – just a hint of green apple. A dumb phase? Just young? (There was quite a bit of spritz still.) The color shows some evolution towards a light golden.

It’s my last bottle, so I won’t be able to test out any theories. (Purchased in Oct. 2003 and stored in temp control since.)

I was just e-mailing Mel Knox to say that a bottle of his Uvaggio NV Vermentino Passito from Lodi was way more interesting – layers and layers of flavors, great acidity, light bodied. And he still has some to sell, I think.
Prum 02 Graacher.jpg

John,

Maybe I ll put the passito up on the next Berserkers day.
Then everyone s blood sugar can go berserk


M

Surprising about the Prum. Do some vintages take longer than this to reach their open stage? It seems like 18 years from vintage should be enough. I think '02 is still in the era of high levels of SO2 and a good bit of age being necessary, though. (By the way, we don’t need to rehash the debate about whether or not the SO2 levels were high. I think we can all agree that they use less now than they used to.)

Oh come on! We don’t need to debate the absolute levels, but can’t we engage in some old school Rovani bashing about his claims of illegal levels of sulfur?

Hahaha, that sounds like it would be in good fun, so no problem there. In the past, I have mentioned that the wines used to contain high levels of SO2 and people have argued with me (bizarrely). I just didn’t want to get into that whole thing again.

I actually didn’t know about Rovani claiming that. Did he have lab test results to back it up?

In the 70s the levels of SO2 in California Chardonnay probably exceeded some moral law and now…every now and then…we get a note from somebody who just opened one of these bottles and they are just amazed how fresh the wine is.

I visited Prum on a Valckenberg trip back in 2011, and we asked Katharina about SO2 levels. She said that Prum didn’t use higher SO2 than most other top German producers, but that they were one of the few to use the indigenous yeasts in the vineyard instead of cultured yeasts, and that the natural yeast combined with the fermentation and aging in steel produced these aromas in the younger wines.

She also told me once that the high spritz levels in their wines might be due to the fact that they move the wine around less than some producers. I could imagine that transferring wines between casks could oxidize some of the sulfur. But that’s speculation.

He said he did but would never back it up. It was total BS on his part.

Listen to her interview with Levi Dalton.

Drank the last of this last night. Still not very interesting.

A head-scratcher.