2022 Keller Riesling "RR"

Keller's "RR" is one of those insider's bottles.

Normally, the wine is sourced from a rare red-soil parcel within the Kirchspiel. This cask rarely ferments totally dry and the Kellers have always enjoyed the natural balance of the wine. It's what we'd call a "feinherb" - the wine is just a bit off-dry. Normally, you'll see the bottle labeled as "Kirchspiel RR," the "RR" denoting "Riesling" from the "Red" soil.

With vintage 2022, however, Klaus Peter Keller said that a cask from a top parcel of Abtserde and one from a top parcel of Morstein, normally destined for the GGs, simply did not ferment totally dry.

I think the temptation for the Kellers was too much; they had to combine these parcels, these casks.

And so the 2022 comes to us as a rarefied triumvirate - Kirchspiel, as per normal, supercharged with Abtserde and Morstein.

The wine is labeled only as "RR" - KP was the one to joke with me in a text that this year the "RR" stands for "Rolls Royce."

Have no doubt, this is a serious feinherb, just barely off-dry with somewhere around 12 grams of residual sugar and an electric acidity that clocks in at over eight grams per liter. This is one for the history books.

I had the chance to taste through the 2022 collection with the Kellers in April 2023 - the photo above shows only a part of the program. While I tried to be very "fair and balanced" with my recent vintage report, as I taste more and more of the wines and talk to more and more of the growers (including KP), I do think I may have undersold the vintage a bit. At the highest levels, the top dry and just off-dry Rieslings will be masterpieces. The signature of the vintage is lightness, delicacy - an ethereal quality. And the Keller collection had all this, yet with presence and force.

This is not a collection to ignore, which is perhaps an obvious sentiment, but there we are.

A final note on pricing. While this is no small sum of money for a bottle of wine, in the realm of the top Keller wines (which the "RR" is, especially in 2022) this is a very fair price... and the only explanation I can come up with is that the market likes things either black or white, a or b, dry or sweet.

The top Keller GGs - the dry wines - sell for many hundreds of dollars; the top Keller Kabinetts sell for many hundreds of dollars (to say nothing of the 2021 Keller Schubertslay Kabinett Auction which hammered for 1,200 Euros last year).

The "RR" is in the middle, in this beautiful gray area... the word to consider is neither "dry" nor "sweet," but "balanced" - perfectly balanced.

Keep in mind the Kellers also know the market's whims very well. Given a cask that did not ferment dry, they could have easily warmed up the cask, added yeasts - there are a number of tools available to the grower to encourage fermentation, to make the wine totally dry. If they had done this, the result would be a Morstein GG and an Abtserde GG they could sell for four to five times the price of the "RR."

Yet they chose not to... because of this magical balance. There's an importer I really like who uses this phrase a lot: "Never for money, always for love." The line works here too.

KP ended his text about the 2022 "RR" to me with this line: "For wine geeks only."

Who wants a splash?

This offer is now closed. If you need help finding the wines please email orders@sourcematerialwine.com.