2024 Peter Lauer, Riesling Schonfels GG Fass 11, Mosel

The Saar is Riesling at its most uncompromising — steeper, colder, and more demanding than the Mosel proper, producing wines with a nerve and minerality that take your breath away when everything comes together. The Schonfels is one of its most singular sites, and Florian Lauer is the right custodian for it.

The vineyard is a near-vertical cliff face in Ayl — 90% gradients of weathered grey-blue slate, un-terraced and essentially unfarmed by machine. The vines are ungrafted and over 100 years old, their roots reaching deep into fissured rock that has never been replanted, never been grafted onto foreign rootstock. That continuity is increasingly rare and increasingly precious.

2024 was a brutal year — severe spring frosts decimated yields across the Saar, leaving Florian with very little fruit and extraordinary concentration in what survived. Spontaneous fermentation in old Fuder casks, long lees aging, partial malolactic fermentation that adds texture without softening the wine's essential tension. The result is a Grosses Gewächs — Germany's equivalent of a Grand Cru — with a crystalline, saline core, a fluid and surprisingly generous mid-palate, and a finish etched with mineral precision that goes on longer than you expect.