Dr Loosen Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Auslese 2025 (37.5cl)
£25.45
The wine
Wehlener Sonnenuhr means the sundial of Wehlen, after the stone dial built into the slope in 1842 so pickers could tell the time. It is among the most famous vineyards in Germany: pure blue slate, precipitously steep, and reliably the source of the Mosel's most delicate and long-lived Rieslings.
Auslese means selected harvest: late-picked, very ripe bunches, often with some noble rot, fermented to leave natural sweetness at just 9% alcohol. Riesling's acidity keeps that sweetness in balance, and it is what allows Ernst Loosen's Auslesen to develop for decades. A half bottle.
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.
