Von Winning, Haardter Herrenletten, Erste Gewächs Riesling 2022

The white wines from Von Winning have given such joy and happiness to many people  in Ireland for the past decade - this latest addition to the importing family at The Allotment is a particular beauty.

Another single-vineyard Premier Cru, this wine exudes perfume of intense fruits: cherry blossom, orange zest, stone-fruits of apricot and white peach, cashew nuts and even notes of toasted hazelnuts. The palate is juicy and mouth-filing but balanced by a saline streak that creates a stunning tension as your palate gets railroaded by the complexity and density of this stunning Riesling.

From the village of Haardt (from whom the important southern mountain range takes its name), this vineyard of Herrenletten ("Men's Leased Land Plot" (or Men's Allotment...) in English) is full of loam soil which has an amazing capacity to store water, meaning that in dry vintages there is enough in store for growth and that in wet vintages the vines never flood.

This is another stunning Riesling from one of The Allotment's favourite wineries. Made from grapes that are grown in the village of Haardt, the wines are made in Deidesheim where the Von Winning winery is located. Not many other grapes can offer such charm as well as vitality, sunshine and versatility for matching pretty much any food style you can think of.

If you don't know this winery yet, you must!

One of Germany’s longest-running wineries, Weingut von Winning was founded in 1849 and given a new lease of life by Achim Niederberger in 2007. Bringing on board winemaker Stephan Attman and, in time, Andreas Hütwohl, the project was one of clear and brilliant simplicity: the wines from Pfalz were some of the most famous and expensive wines available in the 1850s.

• Why?
• What were they like?
• Why does no one really drink them as much any more?

The answers were fairly obvious:

1. They were amazing
2. They were amazing;
3. They became sweet and mass-produced and lost all sense of terroir and authenticity.

The "New" Von Winning then was a clear plan to resurrect old winemaking techniques using the best grapes and single vineyards available, which, as it turned out, was fairly easy because the best grapes were quite literally on their doorstep. These wines then are fermented in large wooden barrels that are 1,200 litres in capacity and oval in shape, they are a traditional German barrel called Stücke, literally 'pieces'.

These have no oak flavour impact, but allow for the Riesling to be really expressive and lose the twangy metallic texture that can come from some stainless steel only fermented wines. As we've got to know them, the wines that they make from a dizzying number of different vineyard names have offered myriad views of Riesling through the same multi-faceted crystal.