Keller G-Max Vertical Tasting: The Aura of a Legend

Anyone with enough money can organize a vertical tasting of, say, Chateau Mouton Rothschild, because several hundred thousand bottles are produced each vintage. But a wine like the Keller G-Max, which is made in Rheinhessen, Germany, belongs to a completely different species of cult wines that are partly defined by their scarcity.

The most expensive dry riesling in the word, the G-Max was first produced in the 2001 vintage and therefore hasn’t even reached its first quarter century. This makes the achievements of the winemaking husband-and-wife team behind it, Klaus Peter and Julia Keller, alongside their son Felix, even more extraordinary.

All of this made the invitation to a vertical tasting of every vintage of G-Max bottled irresistible. The organizer, German book and magazine publisher Ralf Frenzel, has a long track record of organizing extraordinary tastings, and this promised to be another one. The choice of location, Steinheuers Restaurant in the beautiful Ahr Valley, was ideal.

Normally, German wine collectors are happy to bask in the aura of great wines, but this time there were requests for anonymity, so all I can say is that were just over a dozen tasters and each vintage was poured from a single 75-centiliter bottle, all of which came from Frenzel’s cellar. Their total value was perhaps $100,000.

At JamesSuckling.com, we try to cut through the wine myths, particularly when they grew out of pure speculation. In the case of the Keller G-Max, a serious amount of nonsense is in circulation, in part driven by the stratospheric prices on the secondary market.

First, a few words about the name G-Max, which is certainly unusual. Max comes from the name of the Kellers' oldest son, Maximillian, and G stands for Georg, Klaus Peter’s great grandfather. He was the first member of the family to sell bottled wine, starting in 1921, and is therefore the de facto founder of the Keller winery. There is simply no weird sexual connotation with G-Max (as in “G-spot” plus“maximum”), as is frequently claimed.

The Kellers have 21 hectares of vineyards in the Wonnegau subregion of Rheinhessen, and 70 percent of them are planted with riesling. Their vineyards include parcels in a string of GG sites, most famously the Oberer Hubacker of Florsheim-Dalsheim (first vintage, 2001) where the winery is based, and the Morstein and Kirchspiel of Westhofen (first vintage, 2002), where Julia grew up.

G-Max is not a GG, standing to one side of the modern German hierarchy for dry wines. But it’s also not a selection of the best grapes from various sites, as is sometimes claimed. Instead, it comes from a single-vineyard parcel, and for understandable reasons the Kellers don’t want to reveal where it lies. However, Klaus Peter doesn’t hesitate to say that the very old vines are planted on stony soils atop massive limestone.

Some of their fans may find it hard to believe, but as fanatical as the Kellers are about wine quality, they see themselves primarily as wine growers. A lot of precise canopy management is done, with this and all other vineyard work precisely adapted to how the growing season develops. “Climate change forces us to adopt maximum flexibility in the vineyard cultivation,” Klaus Peter told me during a recent vineyard tour.

The same applies to the harvest, he said. “Julia and I are out in the vineyards every day and Felix is in charge of pressing the grapes. All of the top dry wines are basket-pressed, which is very time-consuming and a lot of extra work compared with using modern pneumatic presses.”

G-Max usually ferments primarily in a well-used 1,000-liter fuder oak barrel, but there have been vintages when the crop wasn’t large enough to fill this cask. The fuder is the traditional oak wine barrel of the Mosel wine region to the north, so this choice might look eccentric in one of the Rhine regions where the oval Stuck is the traditional wine cask. However, the explanation for this choice is simple: Klaus Peter’s mother, Hedwig (who died in 2000), came from the Mosel.

Apart from this there’s nothing fancy about the winemaking. Wild fermentation is now normal for high-end dry white wines in Germany, as is a long period of maturation on the full lees, so there’s no big cellar story to tell.

The reasons for G-Max’s special reputation are complex, but the most important of them is the way it tastes. Scroll down and read the tasting note for the extraordinary 2003 vintage. This was the hottest growing season ever recorded in Germany, and plenty of dry whites from 2003 were heavy or clumsy as young wines. Even the better examples are now mostly past their best, and it is the extraordinary vitality and elegance of the G-Max 2003 that makes it the dry German white wine of the vintage.

It comes from the period when Julia and Klaus Peter realized that they had unwittingly created a new cult wine. “We never planned it at all; it was all naive,” Klaus Peter explained. “At the beginning, the price was 60 euros per bottle and we thought we would limit the wines to friends and family.” Today, almost the entire production is sold in the “Kellerkiste,” or Keller case, which contains five bottles of riesling GGs and one bottle of G-Max for around $4,000. For those lucky enough to be able to purchase directly from the Kellers, the price looks much more humane, with the "Kellerkiste" costing just over $1,500. 

This brings me to one of the most important things that the tasting revealed. Even more than the Keller riesling GGs, G-Max benefits from long aging. Yes, you can drink the 2022, which is just being released, but it will be rather closed and need long aeration. However, if you can wait at least five years, you will be richly rewarded by an incredible textural and aromatic complexity.

Yes, the Keller G-Max is very concentrated, but no, it is not a huge mouth-filling wine. Recent vintages, let’s say from 2016 onward, stand out due to their incredible focus, energy and brilliance – all this in spite of the string of warm vintages. This also applies to the Kellers’ riesling GGs. They are all amazing wines that are not quite like anything else in Germany or on Planet Wine.

Please note that the 1999 and 2000 wines are included because these were the immediate predecessors of G-Max. For reasons that Ralf Frenzel was not willing to reveal, the 2001 vintage of G-Max was missing from the tasting.

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor