LauerRiesling No. 111 Schonfels Kabinett 2023 (750ml)

Here we present only the third Kabinett Lauer has ever made from the Schonfels vineyard. Always, always – no matter if this is dry of off dry – you taste the site. Always, always, one of my favorite wines of the vintage.

The Schonfels is one of the most daunting sites of the Saar; under Florian Lauer’s care, it is also becoming one of the most famous sites. While the vineyard has always had a huge reputation, Florian’s father let the site go fallow in the 1980s. The reason? It’s too damn expensive and too difficult and dangerous to farm. The vines here are over 100 years old and ungrafted. Thus, even in good years, the yield is paltry. In addition, because the site is so steep, it is very difficult and very dangerous to farm. In fact, as the site “ends” in a rock face that drops a few hundred feet to a street below, harvesters must be harnessed in, via a carabiner, to a tractor parked at the top of the vineyard. There can be no slipping here; it is truly a matter of life and death.

And while it’s all very easy and dramatic for me to write about this, and while the wine has gone on to become one of the legendary wines of the Saar and of Germany, Florian’s decision, in the late 2000s, to rehabilitate this site was equal parts daring, brilliant, insane, and potentially financially crippling to the estate. The site had been fallow for well over a decade, so it essentially looked like a young forest. Months of (dangerous) work were required to rip out, by hand, most of the wild vegetation, in the hopes that the vines would still be alive. Luckily, they were. And luckily, the reputation of the site has proven itself. But this was a serious, serious gamble. Florian is a boss.