Winemaker Notes
Aromas of caramel and a note of honey. Full-bodied, with slate minerality and green apple on the palate.
Professional Ratings
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Vinous
The 2024 Riesling Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spätlese is a total tease. Aromatic citrus shimmers on the nose, uniting grapefruit, tangerine and bergamot scents. Citrus foliage adds an extra frisson of freshness. The palate homes in on that line between tartness and the ripe aroma that you find only in the most exquisite citrus fruits. The 2024 has an allure and fusion of impressions that is inextricable and therefore beguiling. It is simply wonderful, fresh, light and so elegant. (Medium)
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James Suckling
Creamy and dreamy, with white peach, honeysuckle and pomelo aromas plus minty freshness. Really succulent, but every bit as animating on the medium-bodied palate. Then the vibrant acidity wipes up the natural grape sweetness in the finish with great alacrity and creates wonderful tension with the whole basket of fruit flavors.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2024 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spätlese offers a complex, immediately saline and stimulating bouquet of bright tropical fruits, delicate and coolish slate and herbal aromas. Full-bodied and intense, with a remarkably fine texture, this is a saline, savory and even mouthwatering Spätlese with substance, structure and length. 8% stated alcohol. Natural cork.
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Wine Spectator
An opulent, rich version that leans into its sweetness, with luscious layers of peach, pear and apple. Oily in feel, this glides through alongside lashings of smoke and petrol, plus pink peppercorn spiciness. Hints of baking spices and salty mineral depth reveal themselves on the long, winding, slate-lined finish. Drink now through 2040.
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.