Through sheer force of will and no lack of patience, Prüm has made a tiny amount of Goldkapsel this year. For this rare style, multiple passes and draconian selections were required to harvest fruit at precisely the right level of ripeness. Harvesting continued until the last days of October, but Prüm finally got there, and the wines are jaw-droppingly good. Although botrytis was rare this year, Prüm was also able to bring in some botrytis-affected grapes, which, in the end, accounted for roughly one-third of the fruit that made the wines.
Katharina Prüm explains the Goldkapsel wines in this way: “Think of them as limited edition, small production lots of the best Auslese of a vintage. They are made from stronger, selected grapes containing more concentrated juice, usually affected by a certain amount of botrytis. They can age even remarkably longer than ‘basic’ Auslesen, lasting for many decades. Over time, they lose some of their sweetness, gain more and more elegance and harmony, and the complex profile and depth come to the forefront.”
Goldkapsel wines can work very well with desserts—ideally fruit-based dishes or crème caramel, typically nothing too sweet or chocolate-based. However, they are again better paired—especially with age—with robust, savoury food and especially cheese. Regarding savoury dishes, you can throw anything at them, even very spicy dishes, red meat and the same flavours mentioned in the Auslese bracket above. These wines are far more versatile than most dry whites and certainly more so than all red wine styles.
Remarkably, Prüm also managed to make a single Auslese Long Goldkapsel this year from Zeltinger Sonnenuhr. Often made with a higher degree of botrytis than the straight Goldkapsel wines (roughly 50% this year), the style could be described as bridging a gap between traditional Goldkap and Beerenauslese. In truth, they are simply selections of Goldkap that show something extra—greater depth, purity, intensity and precision. They are wines that Prüm considers excellent and unique examples of their vintage and site. Katharina notes that they could have registered this wine as a BA but ultimately felt the style sat closer to the Goldkapsel category. She also believes it may have been the large percentage of old, ungrafted vines that enabled Zeltinger to attain more botrytis and go that bit further in 2022. To differentiate from the Goldkap wines, the Prüm estate marks these special releases with two white stripes at the bottom of the golden capsule, in contrast to only one stripe for the regular Goldkap.