Peter Lauer, Stirn Fass 15 Riesling 2022

100% Riesling

Saar, Mosel, Germany

The 2022 ‘Stirn’ No.15 is a fully off-dry wine (with 36 g/l of residual sugar) made from fruit picked in the prime south-west-facing, upper-front part of the original Ayler Kupp hill. It reveals a fully aromatic and appealing nose of yellow fruits (pineapple, Conference pear, and quince), candied grapefruit, tangerine, green apple, anise, oriental spices, and smoke. The wine proves fully off dry on the palate as plenty of sweet and ripe fruits come through. The finish is structured and has more mineral elements with zesty and minty elements. 

For purists, there is nothing like the Saar. It is arguably one of the greatest, most unique wine-growing regions on earth. The core of greatness in the Saar is intensity without weight, grandiosity without size. Frank Schoonmaker put it best in his 1956 tome The Wines of Germany: “In these great and exceedingly rare wines of the Saar, there is a combination of qualities which I can perhaps best describe as indescribable – austerity coupled with delicacy and extreme finesse, an incomparable bouquet, a clean, very attractive hardness tempered by a wealth of fruit and flavor which is overwhelming.”

Florian’s general style is exactly the opposite of his famous Saar neighbors Egon Müller and Hanno Zilliken. At Lauer, the focus is on dry-tasting Rieslings as opposed to the residual sugar wines of the latter two. Employing natural-yeast fermentations, Lauer’s wines find their own balance. They tend to be more textural, deeper and more masculine. They have a preternatural sense of balance, an energy that is singular. Yet the hallmarks of the Saar are there: purity, precision, rigor, mineral.

Florian’s playground is the breathtaking hillside of the Kupp. Though the many vineyards of this mountain were unified (obliterated?) under the single name “Kupp” with the 1971 German wine law, it has been Florian’s life’s work to keep the old vineyard names alive, to keep these voices alive. He has been fighting this fight since his first vintage in 2005 and only with an update to the law in 2014 can he now legally use the older vineyard names such as Unterstenberg, Stirn, Kern and Neuenberg.

In addition to the expanses of the Kupp, Lauer farms two other important sites, the Saarfeilser directly across the river and the precipitous, cliff-vineyard Schonfels, a bit upstream from the other two sites. Florian also recently cleared and replanted the famous Lambertskirch, just a stone’s throw from Schonfels.