Our Wine Choice: Carl Loewen Riesling Mosel Alte Reben Trocken 2022

At JamesSuckling.com we are obsessed with wine quality and make no apology for it. The reason is that most of you are the same way. But let’s be honest, sometimes the wines we rate the highest are not easy to find and can be expensive.

While a few wine regions have a culture of striving to align the highest quality with substantial quantities, this is not in the DNA of every region. Bordeaux, for example, is a place where this is the case, but Burgundy is usually not. That’s what makes the many wines from the latter region genuinely exclusive.

And just like in Burgundy, a lot of the very best wines of Germany – where I live and have been following developments for 40 years – are produced in limited or very limited quantities, so their high prices make them an unrealistic option to buy.

That’s why I love wines like the Carl Loewen Riesling Mosel Alte Reben Trocken 2022. It’s a very expressive and a beautifully balanced dry riesling with the kind of concentration that’s only possible from old vines. But it also comes at a user-friendly price, and due to an annual production approaching 50,000 I can easily afford to buy a case or two.

The Mosel Valley is beautiful thanks to the way the Mosel River snakes its way through the surrounding hill country, but the steep sites with stony slate soil are hard to cultivate. This is because there’s no way you can fully mechanize the work there, and it’s difficult to find people willing to do the demanding labor. Wines like the Alte Reben Trocken, which manage to be economically sustainable and relatively inexpensive, are vital to the future of the region. Here is all the spring-like freshness and the stony intensity that makes the Mosel unique. And that makes this wine doubly joyful.

The J word is thanks to Christopher Loewen, who recently took over the Carl Loewen estate from his father, Karl Josef. I’ve known Karl Josef since the early 1990s and it has great to watch how, beginning in 2012, Christopher has brought new ideas to the table without sacrificing any of his father’s principles. First among these are that modestly priced wines should also be delicious and have the characteristic lightness of touch that makes Mosel riesling unique. This wine embodies all that family and regional tradition in a thoroughly modern way.

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor