Joh Jos Prüm Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spatlese 2020

Joh. Jos. Prüm needs no introduction to Riesling lovers, having already become a Mosel icon during the nearly five decades during which its namesake’s son Sebastien was in charge. Katharina Prüm has been active alongside her father, Manfred, since early in the new millennium, and the two of them perpetuate a house style that has itself become a Mosel archetype: wines of delicacy and restrained sweetness, often strongly marked in youth by yeasty and otherwise fermentative aromas, and tingling with dissolved CO2. Their longevity is legendary, and the Prüms personally don’t care to drink their own wines – even the Kabinetts – with less than a dozen, and usually many more, years in bottle. The aromas of youthful Prüm wines make it obvious that fermentation here is entirely spontaneous. Manfred makes no secret of his longstanding disinterest in legally dry wines. These are uncompromising, benchmark Mosel wines.

The Wehlener Sonnenuhr vineyard has become intrinsically attached to the name of Joh. Jos. Prüm. The Estate owns five hectares of this majestic site. It offers perfect growing conditions for the Riesling grape with its deep, weather-beaten grey slate soil, good water support, extreme steepness of up to 70 % gradient, and its optimal south-south-west exposure. Wehlener Sonnenuhr is named after the sundial erected in the vineyard in 1842 by Jodocus Prüm, an ancestor of J.J. Prüm, to give the workers a better time orientation. The wines of the Wehlener Sonnenuhr possess excellent structure, show beautiful, ripe aromas and flavors (typically stone fruits), a fine minerality, and great depth and length. After having been aged for some years, the harmony, finesse and expression of these wines is unique. Stuart Pigott writes “Joh Jos Prüm’s Sonnenuhrs are classic examples of the way in which the best Mosel wine’s natural sweetness magnifies, rather than obscures, their character.”