2022 Müller-Ruprecht "Kabinett Trocken" 

Keller and I never spoke about Müller-Ruprecht's basic Kabinett Trocken (above center); he didn't tell me he was going to post about it.

Yet when Keller Instagramed the above image, I had to laugh. I've had the same *exact* reaction to this wine, now for four vintages in a row.

If we were the type of outfit prone to hyperbole and sales excess, we might write a line like this: This dry Riesling is a masterclass in precision and lift. It is simply perfect in so many ways, live-wire fruit and acid, exquisite balance - it drinks with the class of a wine many times the price. Do not miss!

But of course we are a more restrained, scholarly service. :)

The first time I ever had this wine was with the 2019 vintage. In fact, I remember being blown away and thinking that this "basic" wine had something of the shimmering cut of Weiser-Künstler's dry Riesling. It was so good, we featured it in an offer as a follow-up to our "Golden Generation" email.

I wrote the following in that email: "One of my favorite things in the entire universe is a 'basic' wine that playfully flirts with being profound. It's rare to do something, even if it's a simple thing, perfectly. Yet that's how this wine struck me... it is angelic, crystalline with a perfect reduction. I would drink this all day long and would buy cases of it, personally. If you like great dry Riesling that doesn't cost that much."

Yet by the time I visited Müller-Ruprecht the following year I had all but forgotten about this very special "basic" wine.

Then I tasted it and, again, I was shocked... by how lithe it was, how clear and tactile, how incisive yet delicate.

It is not a normal occurrence to be consistently floored by a basic wine. But when you are, you sure as hell ask what's going on.

And as it turns out, this is not really a basic wine; it is a single-vineyard bottling from a site with a good amount of limestone. The estate normally bottles the wine simply as an estate wine, a "Gutswein," but it is in fact a Kabinett Trocken.

By the time I tasted the 2022 - a vintage whose soaring, ethereal quality I adore - I just flat-out asked if we could do a special label.

To me, this wine is so obviously perfect, it is so delicious, so effortlessly great... but it also exhibits exactly that lightness and minutia of detail that I associate with one of my all-time favorite categories.

You know what I'm talking about: Kabinett Trocken.

My friend Joe Beddia had done a drawing for a "Kabinett Trocken" T-shirt we produced some years back, celebrating the genre, and I simply asked Joe if we could use this for the label.

He kindly obliged. (Thanks Joe! We are pictured together in the Mosel this summer at the wine's official release party, sort of.)

In return, he received a hearty allocation of this wine and if you are in the Philadelphia area in the fall of 2023, you can run right now over to Pizzeria Beddia and enroll in @soilpimp's preferred study class: pizza and Kabinett Trocken.

If you are not in the Philadelphia area, you have two choices. One, you can fly to Philadelphia and eat pizza and drink Kabinett Trocken, or, two, you can reply to this email to order yourself a bit... or a lot.

We'd advocate the latter.

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