OUR WINE CHOICE: KATHARINA WECHSLER RIESLING RHEINHESSEN TROCKEN 2022

Apart from a few handful of star producers, German wine prices remain moderate and bargains are sometimes startling. That’s particularly the case where a wine tastes as if it actually belongs in the next category above it, like Our Wine Choice this week.

The Katharina Wechsler Riesling Rheinhessen Trocken 2022 is a so-called “estate riesling,” meaning an entry-level wine from a leading producer. The wines of this humble category are often rather fruity and well-balanced with a certain amount of depth but lack serious character. That is not the case with this miniature masterpiece from the limestone terroirs of the town of Westhofen in the Wonnegau sub-region of Rheinhessen. Instead, it has the kind of concentration and structure we associate with successful village wines.

In Germany’s very heterogeneous 2022 vintage, there are some single-vineyard dry rieslings that don’t match the level of this wine, yet it only costs the equivalent of about $12 to $13 locally.

Katharina Wechsler’s story deserves to be told, not just because it’s a good story but also because it says a lot about her region. Back in 2009 she was an editorial assistant at a major TV station in Berlin when she got a telephone call from her mother saying that the family farm (it was then a mix of wine and other crops) would be closed down because there was nobody to take it over.

Wechsler was torn between the excitement of Berlin and her roots, but she came back home to Westhofen. For two years she immersed herself in grape-growing and winemaking, and also worked in nearby Florsheim-Dalsheim for Klaus Peter Keller of Weingut Keller, who once described her to me as “one of the best students I ever had.”

Back at the turn of the last century, nearly all the numerous talented young winemakers in Rheinhessen felt more or less like outsiders because their region had been the most important producer of the cheap and sweet Liebfraumilch, which statistically dominated Germany’s wine exports. They not only wanted out of this corner, they wanted to move in the direction of distinctive and expressive dry wines.

Eventually, they formed a young producers’ network called Message in a Bottle (yes, named after The Police song) and they very freely shared experiences and ideas of all kinds. The result was a quantum leap in quality. Around the time Wechsler was striking out on her own, a journalist asked me to describe the new Rheinhessen. I answered, “It’s the Dream Factory of dry wines.” I still get asked about those words today!

Wechsler is one of the most prominent examples of the second wave of young winemakers in the region who benefited from the achievements of the first wave (think Klaus Peter Keller, Philipp Wittmann and Oliver Spanier). But not all of those in the second wave continued developing in the way that Wechsler did. She recently converted her 17 hectares of vineyards to organic viticulture, and with her new partner, Manuel Maier (they were recently married), she completely revamped the winery’s marketing.

Also, what looked like a tentative stab at unfiltered wines has become an impressive range of products called Cloudy by Nature. There are no better natural wines made in Germany!

Some might say this dry riesling from 2022 is conventional in comparison, but within its category it is pretty radical and an ideal introduction to the German dry wine Dream Factory.