2023 Peter Lauer Ayler Riesling Faß 25

WINEMAKER: Florian Lauer
REGION: Mosel, GER
VARIETY: Riesling
VITICULTURE: Organic

Fass 25 is dry fermented. Coming from the eastern slopes of Scheidterberg and Rauberg, it reflects the spicy side of the Ayler Riesling terroir and displays fine herbal and saline notes. The 2023er Ayler Riesling N°25 is a dry wine made from fruit picked on the Scheidterberg and Rauberg side hills. It offers a very herbal and minty nose of wild spices, blackberry, licorice, yuzu, smoke, aniseed, and hot spices. The wine is light-weighted and very spicy on the linear and finely creamy palate. The feeling of acidity is on the lower side, but this is balanced out by mineral, spicy, and salty elements. The finish is nicely dry, broad, and medium long.

For purists, there is nothing like the Saar. Saar shows intensity without weight, grandiosity without size: rocks and acidity. 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.” Yes, this is the Saar. Peter Lauer, founded in 1830, is currently one of greatest estates in this sacred place.

Florian Lauer is today making some of the best Riesling in Germany from his vines around the Saar town of Ayl. The style at Lauer is quite the opposite of his famous Saar neighbours, Egon Müller and Hanno Zilliken – the focus at Lauer is for dry and off-dry Rieslings bottled from single sites, identified by their cask number, as opposed to the Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese wines of the latter two made using the German Prädikat System. Yet the hallmarks are similar: purity, precision, intensity, minerality.