Dr Loosen Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Grosses Gewächs Reserve Alte Reben 2019
£73.95
The wine
The Reserve wines are held back and aged on their lees in large oak Fuder casks for several years before release, a practice Ernst Loosen revived from pre-war Mosel tradition on the view that great Riesling was never meant to be bottled young. Released here with six years behind it.
Wehlener Sonnenuhr is pure blue slate on one of the steepest slopes on the river, and Alte Reben means old ungrafted vines. Grosses Gewächs is Germany's designation for a dry wine from a classified great vineyard, roughly the equivalent of a grand cru. It requires hand harvesting, severely restricted yields and dry fermentation, and was created by the VDP growers' association in the 1990s to give the country's finest dry wines a clear signal, since the old system classified only by sugar at harvest.
The producer
Dr Loosen
View all Dr Loosen winesThe Loosen family have owned this Mosel estate for over two hundred years, and Ernst Loosen took it over in 1988. What he inherited was unusually valuable: ungrafted vines up to a century old in some of the finest sites in Germany, on the precipitous slate slopes above the river.
He changed almost nothing in the vineyard and everything in the approach. Yields were cut drastically, picking became severely selective, and the winemaking was pared back to gentle handling and ambient yeasts in traditional oak casks. Within a few years the estate had become one of the most admired in Germany, and Loosen himself one of the most articulate advocates Riesling has ever had.
The Mosel is the coolest major wine region in Germany and its vineyards are among the steepest worked anywhere, some exceeding sixty degrees. Blue Devonian slate stores the day's heat and radiates it back at night, which is what allows Riesling to ripen this far north. The wines are famous for combining very low alcohol with intense flavour and a mineral, smoky character no other region reproduces.
