2018 St. Nikolaus Riesling Spatlese Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr Mosel Germany 750 ml

Riesling at its finest offers sappy, golden fruit perfectly married to shimmering minerality delivered with an acid structure as precise as the fine-edged slate in the ground where it grows. To achieve that finest level, you need the best producers using fruit from their best sites. St. Nikolaus does exactly that with their 2018 Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr Spätlese, garnering 93 points and a “Best Buy” call-out from Wine & Spirits magazine. With just enough natural sweetness to balance Riesling’s trademark taut acidity, the wine is a masterclass in balance from Germany’s premier region, the Mosel Valley.

When we think about the Mosel, we think about steep, sloping vineyards tended in Teutonic neatness. As the river winds slowly in sinuous curves around their feet, pole-trained vines wave their happy leaves at the sun passing overhead. It’s picturesque. Vineyards bear names that translate to things like Spice Garden, Drops of Gold, and Kingdom of Heaven. The wines taste like cold, pure mountain brooks and shards of sunshine, like immortality, like wisdom and joy.

Riesling is an undeniable attitude adjuster. With their best-in-class Spätlese, this 93-point 2018 St. Nikolaus will become a regular at your house at $22 per bottle. Wine & Spirits declared it a “Best Buy” and one of its “Best Mosel Rieslings,” raving “It’s simply delicious, in an open-armed, warm and inviting way,” and delivers a mélange of flavors with “a velvety-soft touch.” 

These are all true and wonderful things, but they obscure the vigneron’s reality: that these are the hardest vineyards to work on the planet and that Mosel slopes are the cause of both long hours of backbreaking toil and engineering genius. A quick image search will show you the ingenious cable-car system for hauling harvest baskets. Meanwhile, vineyard workers have to be tied in while at work, lest they tumble—footing is treacherous on shifting crumbly slate at a slant.

That slant is no joke: The steepest vineyard in the world (65% grade) is in the Mosel town of Bremm. Not far away is St. Nikolaus winery’s town of Brauneberg, looking north over the river to its prize parcel, the Juffer-Sonnenuhr (a mere 50-60% in grade). If Germany had Grands Crus, this would be one of them.

The best sites in the Mosel have been known for centuries, and St. Nikolaus is also the oldest estate in the Middle Mosel, dating to 1458. Now boasting a state-of-the-art winery and one of the most talented winemaking teams in the region, this estate has transformed itself in short order into one of our Producers to Watch.

So, how did anyone decide to plant vineyards in places like this to begin with? The Romans, who first put vines in the ground here certainly loved wine, but not for its complexities. No, they used it to add to their drinking water since not even Roman engineering had conquered water-borne bacteria. The monks who took over after them surely found the time spent in nature and the grueling labor involved tools in their quest to know God. But the real reason is that this is where you could get the grapes ripe—keep it simple.

The Mosel is pretty far north, as far as vines are concerned, so to get grapes sufficiently ripe, you need some special conditions. That’s why the steepest and most south-facing, slate-rich slopes were prized. Then there’s the grade of the hillside, which, combined with the vertical pole training, means that the foliage of any one vine is only in shade from the one in front of it for a few minutes per day. 

To find the best vineyards in the Mosel, look at the clock: the choicest parcels have the word sonnenuhr in their name, or “sundial.” The Germans meant it literally: there is an actual sundial carved into a sheer face of rock in the middle of the Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr vineyard. Watches haven’t been around all that long, but Germans have always wanted to be on time.

The sundial exposition means the vines receive a maximum number of sun hours (up to 15 per day in summer), while the exposed slate on the ground mitigates the cold nights by storing warmth during the day—both absorbed from the sun above and reflected back from the river below—and then radiating it back out to the vines at night. The result is the perfect confluence of conditions that make Mosel Riesling one of the world’s most prized white wines.

To add one more superlative, 2018 is a stunning vintage for the Mosel. With their 40-year-old vines, St. Nikolaus has captured the focus, killer aromatics, and unparalleled clarity that keep us coming back time and again to Riesling. The delicate sweetness that will welcome duck, spicy seafood, and schnitzel of any origin is on full display, and it’s a steal at under $25.