2018 Wasenhaus Spätburgunder 'Mohlin,' Baden

Their first vintage is 2016 and it was an incredible start. The style is as lifted and charming as it is serious. There are no tricks here, just a reverence for their fruit and a solid knowhow in both the cellar and vineyards. Their wines are crafted with clear intention; there’s no way anyone could achieve their level of quality in the first go-round by accident.

They are soft on extraction with very few punch downs during the fermentation, only the occasional movement of the cap, mostly by hand, to insure a healthy beginning. Sulfur is used judiciously (no more than 30-50 parts per million in total) and not applied until after malolactic fermentation. Their theory on the timing of the first sulfur addition is that the tannins would be more smoothly integrated than with additions beforehand, especially when there are whole cluster fermentations involved. (When it’s added during the vinification period—including primary and malolactic fermentation—the wine has more time to clearly define itself; while those that have earlier additions before fermentation potentially maintain harder tannins that could take much longer to evolve in the bottle, it leaves some of the best potential moments of the wine’s life subordinate to a potentially overbearing tannic structure.) The wines are all aged in oak barrels, but it’s too early to say what their practice will be from one vintage to the next concerning the amount of new oak—they are still discovering what works.