2019 Von Winning Estate Riesling Trocken Pfalz Germany 750 ml

Germany had a once-in-a-lifetime vintage in 2019. And with their elegant and racy Estate Riesling, Von Winning served up one of the Pfalz region’s biggest bargains. 

“When vintages like this come around,” said Master Sommelier Sur Lucero, “the great producers like Von Winning make for an incredible value, offering entry-level wines with richness and depth.” 

The depth came from an especially auspicious summer in Dedesheim and Forst, where Von Winning tends their vines, including those in their eight Grand Cru sites. Heat waves rolled through in June, July, and August, ripening the grapes in stages with intermittent rest. Heavy rains came in mid-October, then dried quickly ahead of the delightfully warm weeks of harvest. Bottom line: These were optimal conditions for wines of exceptional character.

Von Winning knew exactly how to handle this gift. This is a historically great producer from one of the world’s most undervalued regions, crafting wine from the best crop in a half-century.

Over the past 13 years Von Winning has been perfecting a turn toward tradition, drawing on the estate’s 300 years of vine-growing and winemaking while embracing the generally warmer and more favorable climatic conditions they’ve seen over the last decade. They’ve dialed back interventions in the cellar and increased the density of the vines in the field, creating competition for water that drives intensity on the vines. To use a film metaphor, they’ve created conditions for a knock-out performance, rather than trying to fix it all in post. 

That killer combo dovetailed perfectly with “Germany’s 100-point vintage,” as Suckling called it, allowing Von Winning to create exquisite expressions of the Pfalz terroir. 

This exemplary Riesling is pure and lively, with enough flesh to bite into and enough juiciness to smack the lips with white peach, pear and a subtle pineapple tanginess. It’s got more weight than ever, but it’s still lithe from tip to tail—so drinkable that it’s hard not to slurp it all the way down now, but give it five to ten years to reap a subtler magic.

Critic Jancis Robinson named 2019 “Germany’s breakthrough vintage,” heaping praise on what she calls “the greatest white-wine grape in the world.” Stuart Piggot, writing for JamesSuckling.com, said it’s “the best vintage I have ever tasted for German riesling in my four-decade career.”