The Lost World of Riesling: Nahe

“Beyond Bad Kreuznach lies a lost world of wine,” was how winemaker Tim Fröhlich of the Schäfer-Fröhlich estate described the rugged landscape studded with massive volcanic cliffs in the valley of Germany’s Nahe River upstream from the region’s capital, the spa town of Bad Kreuznach. Here, the vineyards cling to narrow terraces or run down precipitous slopes. 

What Fröhlich means by those words is best grasped by tasting his 2016 Felseneck GG, a mind-blowingly vibrant dry riesling with extraordinary herbal and mineral intensity that earned it 99 points. Seldom did a white wine capture a spectacular vineyard landscape more perfectly. That makes it the highest rated dry German white of the 2016 vintage on JamesSuckling.com. However, there are also a slew of other compellingly racy and mineral dry rieslings from the top vineyards of Bockenau (home to Schäfer-Fröhlich and the Felseneck site), Niederhausen, Schlossböckelheim and Norheim with 95+ ratings in this report. This is truly the lost world of riesling!

Maybe its very un-German, but this unique region, with 4,200 hectares of vineyards in the valley of the river Nahe, a tributary of the Rhine, was only officially delimited in 1971; prior to that, most of its crop was bottled and sold as Rhine wines. The map of the Nahe vineyards resembles an octopus with tentacles stretch along the twisting valley of the river Nahe and its tributaries. If you then look at the geological map, then that impression is confirmed by another level of complexity. The most famous producer in the region, Dönnhoff, has vineyards planted on numerous different soil types and that’s normal for the Nahe. 

The vineyard names are frequently tongue twisters, or do Niederhäuser Hermannshöhle and Schlossböckelheimer Kupfergrube roll effortlessly off your tongue? They may be hard names to master, but if you’re interested in mineral-driven whites, then they are worth learning as two of the most important sites of the region. The 2015 Niederhäuser Hermannshöhle Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese from Dönnhoff, a dessert wine of enormous vibrancy and purity, rated a perfect 100 points. That makes the Nahe a serious candidate for Germany’s top-performing wine region. Paradoxically, few consumers around Planet Wine know the name yet.

The extreme stony soils are primarily what set Nahe’s top wines apart and they are very diverse. The most important rock types for riesling are volcanic porphyry and melaphry plus red sandstone and slate. At first glance, soils of these kinds often look like a barren pile of rocks; however, beneath the surface is some finer-grained material recognizable as soil that maintains some moisture. This is important as the Nahe is much drier than other German wine regions such as the Mosel. It’s also the reason why grape yields in the Nahe are typically lower than others.

This special geology and the cool, dry climate are merely the foundations of the Nahe’s uniqueness. The other side of the equation is the willingness of winemakers to let the wines shape themselves to a very large degree. This has nothing to do with so-called “natural” wines though. 

“That way of winemaking would be an insult to the Hermannshöhle!” exclaims Helmut Dönnhoff, who passed on the winemaking at his estates to son Cornelius with the 2007 vintage. For father and son, the most fundamental thing is keeping the time between the moment the grapes are picked and the juice flows from the press as short as possible — exactly the opposite to the long fermentations on the skins typical of white “natural” wines. This and the rigorous selection of the grapes that go into the press explain the frequently praised purity of the Dönnhoff wines. “We also get criticized for this sometimes, but we want the clearest possible expression of the grapes and the vineyard in the glass,” Cornelius explained.

Other leading Nahe winemakers such as Tim Fröhlich and Karsten Peter at Gut Hermannsberg see things differently, accepting more or less funk in their young wines. For them, this is the right basis for the very long ageing capacity that is an essential part of their goal alongside radically authentic site character.

Because dry wines on a quality level with the best contemporary wines weren’t made for an entire generation — the years 1960-1990 — it’s difficult to predict the ageing potential of contemporary, top dry Nahe rieslings. However, a 1914 Schlossböckelheimer Kupfergrube from the former State Domaine, renamed Gut Hermannsberg when it passed into the current ownership in 2010, was still so fresh that I’d have guessed it to be less than half its 103 years of age. 

“That’s something global warming really changed here,” explained Helmut Dönnhoff. “Before the 1990s mostly, when the grapes were fully ripe they had botrytis, which is great for sweet riesling. We only had fully ripe and clean grapes of the kind you need for top dry wines once or twice a decade. Now we get them every year and that enables us to regularly make dry riesling!” 

More and more young winemakers are grasping that opportunity, and there are some names in this report that will be new to many readers, most importantly Hexamer, Korrell, Jakob Schneider and K.H. Schneider (the last two unrelated). They all earned a string of 90+ plus ratings and some 95+ scores, too.

Another important aspect of this change is the way that the pinot family of grapes — weissburgunder aka pinot blanc, grauburgunder aka pinot gris, spatburgunder aka pinot noir and their close relative chardonnay – have grown from being minor specialties to collectively accounting for almost 20% of the region. As our report shows, these wines also have a distinctive personality (they are crisper and sleeker than German, French and Italian examples from further south). The winemakers of the Nahe are moving into uncharted territory in search of another lost world, and we look forward to following their travels.- Stuart Pigott, Contributing Editor.