Senior Editor Nick Stock and Contributing Editor Jack Suckling tasted more than 800 German wines on a weeklong trip to Germany this year. They also visited dozens of wineries and spoke to even more winemakers. They were impressed with the overall quality of the 2018s they tasted and were slightly in awe of numerous beerenauslesen as well as trockenbeerenauslesen despite the vintage being deficient in high amounts of botrytis. Many dry rieslings were equally inspiring, which were easier to produce because of the relatively consistent and hot growing season and clean fruit.
The top-rated wines, as always, were from wine producers’ best vineyard sites, Grosses Gewächs (GGs) or grand crus. Many tuned their viticulture to the extremely hot and dry growing conditions and made an extra effort in the vineyard. But those who did not struggled to maintain acidity and elegance. They found some dry rieslings to be a little phenolic and broad, so consumers should be aware of this.
Nonetheless, our German wine of the year is the Keller Riesling Rheinhessen Morstein GG 2018. Keller remains the benchmark for German’s dry riesling scene and the 2018 Morstein is gorgeous with astonishing minerality, depth of flavor and vibrant combination of zingy acidity and ripeness. But there were many other great GGs and they also appear in the list.
We also list all of our top scoring, super-rare sweet wines including auction lots and other reserve wines. Last year, former editor Stuart Pigott chose only wines that were readily available in the market, but this year we decided to choose from all the wines we tasted no matter the number of bottles made.
Read more: Top 100 German Wines of 2018
2018 an early drinking bonanza
As always, it’s hard to generalize about a vintage like 2018 with different regions and producers as well as differences in grape types, quality levels and sweetness, but the hot growing season and low acidities of 2018 suggest early drinking for most of the wines. The wines were very approachable and transparent when we tasted them a few months ago. By comparison, the 2018s don’t have the depth or intensity of the 2017s we rated last year but they are going to be crowd-pleasers now and in the future.
The great producers of Germany appear to have really dialed in the quality even in super-sweet wines where they harvested grapes at fantastic ripeness levels. This combination of dried fruit and light botrytis that delivered the incredible quality of the wines at the highest levels from beerenauslese to trockenbeerenauslese. And they are all in this list.
The top 20 wines are very much dominated by the ultra-sweet bottles, and these are wines that will be famous for decades to come. They have such strong aging potential and immense power and concentration with striking purity. Eight wines achieved a perfect 100-point rating at the top of the list and 12 achieved a near-perfect rating of 99 points. And while the extremely rare BA and TBA bottlings are justifiably high in price, you’ll also discover some great value wines close to the top of this list.
Wilhelm Weil of Weingut Robert Weil summed up the vintage and what we tasted this year pretty well: “2018 was the hottest growing season ever recorded but it was still possible to make great cool climate wines in the best sites. We learned a lot in this season. The limited water actually slowed the activity of the vines so we had clean grapes, good acidity, moderate alcohols and good hang time. The sweet wines are some of the most intense and most balanced we have ever seen.”
We hope you enjoy the list below and that you can find some of these amazing German wines. To see the full list of German wines tasted this year please click the link below:
Read more: Germany 2019 tasting report – 827 wines tasted
The Keller 2018 rieslings (here being tasted with Klaus-Peter Keller), were succinct, cohesive, precise and thrilling.
