Winemaker Notes
The Grand Cru Ellergrub is Gernot’s favorite vineyard to work. Century-old, pre-phylloxera, ungrafted vines planted on a blue slate hillside of dizzying steepness renders a wine that’s nothing short of profound. It offers intense flavor, integrated juiciness, sensuous texture and extraordinary length and intricacy with guaranteed potential for long maturation. You want the best? This is it.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
The incredible wild herb and licorice aromas pull you inexorably into this enormously structured yet only medium-bodied dry Mosel riesling. Very radical, also radically minerally and dry on the medium-bodied palate. Yet the animating acidity is almost totally below the waterline, like a whale invisibly following a ship. There’s amazing depth and originality in the wild herb and wet stone finish. From organically grown grapes. Drinkable now, but best from 2026.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
From 80+-year-old vines on blue slate, the 2023 Ellergrub is very clear, deep and fresh on the utterly mineral and flinty nose that is saline, pure and stony and concentrated in its fleshy fruit. Round, rich and elegant on the palate, this is a remarkably pure, refined, savory and stimulating saline Ellergrub with fine tannins on the long and intense, stimulating and mouth-tickling finish. This impressive Riesling has never been better. 12% stated alcohol. Natural cork.
Riesling possesses a remarkable ability to reflect the character of wherever it is grown while still maintaining its identity. A regal variety of incredible purity and precision, this versatile grape can be just as enjoyable dry or sweet, young or old, still or sparkling and can age longer than nearly any other white variety. Somm Secret—Given how difficult it is to discern the level of sweetness in a Riesling from the label, here are some clues to find the dry ones. First, look for the world “trocken.” (“Halbtrocken” or “feinherb” mean off-dry.) Also a higher abv usually indicates a drier Riesling.
Following the Mosel River as it slithers and weaves dramatically through the Eifel Mountains in Germany’s far west, the Mosel wine region is considered by many as the source of the world’s finest and longest-lived Rieslings.
Mosel’s unique and unsurpassed combination of geography, geology and climate all combine together to make this true. Many of the Mosel’s best vineyard sites are on the steep south or southwest facing slopes, where vines receive up to ten times more sunlight, a very desirable condition in this cold climate region. Given how many twists and turns the Mosel River makes, it is not had to find a vineyard with this exposure. In fact, the Mosel’s breathtakingly steep slopes of rocky, slate-based soils straddle the riverbanks along its entire length. These rocky slate soils, as well as the river, retain and reflect heat back to the vineyards, a phenomenon that aids in the complete ripening of its grapes.
Riesling is by far the most important and prestigious grape of the Mosel, grown on approximately 60% of the region’s vineyard land—typically on the desirable sites that provide the best combination of sunlight, soil type and altitude. The best Mosel Rieslings—dry or sweet—express marked acidity, low alcohol, great purity and intensity with aromas and flavors of wet slate, citrus and stone fruit. With age, the wine’s color will become more golden and pleasing aromas of honey, dried apricot and sometimes petrol develop.
Other varieties planted in the Mosel include Müller-Thurgau, Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir) and Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc), all performing quite well here.