Despite having left behind a mere four grams of residual sugar, this year’s dry Ellergrub harbors scarcely more alcohol than its Steffensberg counterpart, though it still comes off as decidedly full-bodied. And like its stablemate, it is unusually mineral-dominated for a wine of the vintage, with stony, alkaline, smoky and ashen notes running from the nose to the finish. Palpable lees enrichment reinforces the palate impression of a mineral soup – with a base of juicy apple – but lees-influence may also be one reason why the finish here comes off as less clear than in the Steffensberg and Gaispfad. Still, in its slightly austere way, this is undeniably persistent as well as intriguing. Unlike with most of their 2018s (including all of the residually sweet ones), Weiser and Künstler not only crushed the grapes for this, but gave them nearly a day’s worth of pre-fermentative skin contact (a.k.a. “cold soak”). Weiser felt that this approach would actually help integrate rather than accentuate the grapes’ phenolic content, and the textural polish on exhibit here certainly doesn’t falsify that hypothesis.