Throughout the year when rating individual wines – the core of what we do – everyone on the JamesSuckling.com tasting team has just one criterion: quality. But at the end of the year when we look back and pick the Top 100 wines for a number of countries, we change tack. Here, the criteria are quality, availability, price and the “wow” factor. That’s the reason this list looks is so different compared with the top wines from my recent Germany Annual Tasting Report.

Germany has a long tradition of single-barrel bottlings of dessert wines, but that has recently been extended to dry wines. Yields were low in 2023 because so much rot had to be manually cut out before the healthy fruit went into the press (for white wines) or fermenter (for red wines). That dramatically increased the number of limited-production wines. Regardless of place of origin or who produced them, they don’t qualify for our Top 100 lists.

The reason for that is they’re too difficult to buy. If even I – living in Germany with excellent contacts to producers – sometimes struggle to purchase a couple of bottles, then what chance would you have in Bangkok or New York City or elsewhere?

I worked for many hours to weed these limited-edition, extremely hard-to-find wines out and was surprised just how many there were! Just imagine how I felt when I found that one wine with 100 points had a production of just 666 bottles. That strikes me as an unlucky number (think of the movie "Omen"), but the winemaker told me one customer was desperate to buy bottle No. 666!

Because I live close to Frankfurt I am surrounded by Germany’s wine regions. The only ones I couldn’t do a day trip to are Sachsen and Saale-Unstrut in the former East Germany. This has tremendous practical advantages for my work, but I think it can also blind you to certain things. Putting this list together certainly made me do a rethink.

For example, I did a quick calculation adding the production quantities for all the German wines I rated 100 and 99 points during the last year. The total was slightly below the average annual production of Chateau Lafitte Rothschild, the legendary premier grand cru classe in the Medoc of Bordeaux. That shows just how splintered vineyard ownership in Germany is compared with Bordeaux, or Tuscany, Napa and a bunch of other important wine-producing regions. The situation in Germany is rather similar to that in Burgundy, where leading producers sometimes have tiny parcels in grand cru vineyard sites.

Currently, the largest production of GG, Germany’s unofficial equivalent to the Grand Crus of France, lies at 40,000 bottles. This is the Robert Weil Riesling Rheingau Gräfenberg GG 2023, which finished at No. 96 on this list. It’s only that far down because another more amazing wine from winemaker Wilhelm Weil is positioned much higher up. Scroll down to find the mind-blowing Robert Weil Riesling Rheingau Monte Vacano 2022. (No. 40).

One of the factors that pushed the perfect Künstler Riesling Rheingau Hölle GG 2023 to the very pinnacle of our Top 100 Wines of Germany this year is the fact that winemaker Gunter Kunstler produced 13,000 bottles of it. It is unusually powerful for a German dry riesling, but that’s typical of the top sites in Hochheim, of which the Holle is a prominent example. However, it also has incredible vitality and dynamism, making it a taste of dry riesling nirvana.

For Germany, this is an amazing combination of quality and quantity that we loudly applaud. It is also not an expensive wine for this stratospheric  quality level. In fact, it embodies the excellent value for money for which Germany is famous. What more could you want from our German Wine of the Year?

Bizarrely, the federal German agency for infrastructure (Bundesnetzagentur) is planning to dig up a chunk of the Holle and a number of other legendary vineyard sites in Hochheim to lay electricity cables. Would the French government dig up the Montrachet grand cru site in Burgundy for the same purpose? No. This shows how insanely (willfully?) destructive the plans are.

But onto the No. 2 wine. The Dönnhoff Riesling Nahe Hermannshöhle GG 2023 was also produced in a serious quantity but is somewhat more expensive than our No. 1. This is logical given that this producer was already legendary before Helmut Donnhoff passed the winemaking scepter to his son, Cornelius, in 2007.

The Donnhoff wines are all about finesse. In this case, it’s the interplay of finesse with restrained power that makes the wine so remarkable. Many consumers still think that because wines like this have a delicacy of flavor they won’t age well, but that’s nonsense. The other day I opened the 2005 vintage of this wine and it was still spectacularly youthful and vibrant.

Those wanting more forthright power will be delighted by our No. 3 German wine, the Wittmann Riesling Rheinhessen Morstein GG 2023. Winemaker Philipp Wittmann first attracted attention with his dry riesling from the Morstein site of the 1998 vintage. Since then he has pursued the goal of realizing the greatness of this extremely deep and compelling dry German riesling. 2023 is unquestionably one of the best vintages, maybe even the best so far.

From here I want to jump down the list to No. 9, the Hees Riesling Nahe Römerstich GG 2023, because winemaker Markus Hees is at a comparable stage of his career to Kunstler, Donnhoff and Wittmann 15 to 20 years ago. This is a radically cool-climate and intensely stony wine unlike anything else in Germany. It is an extraordinary achievement when you consider that the Romerstich site was unknown until Hees came along. He would never have been able to pull this off without the example of the generation of winemakers before him.

Nos. 4, 5, 6 and 7 are all riesling GGs from the Pfalz region, which has an optimum climate for making dry riesling due to the moderately warm and dry summers there. Two of these wines come from the same vineyard site, the Kastanienbusch, meaning “chestnut bush” in English. It is an unusually steep slope for the region, situated high up right next to the forested Haardt mountains. It has a red slate soil (rotliegend) that’s rare in this region.

The Dr. Wehrheim Riesling Pfalz Kastanienbusch GG 2023 at No. 4 is a very charismatic wine, with enormous power and wet stone minerality at the finish. The Ökonomierat Rebholz Riesling Pfalz Kastanienbusch GG 2023 at No. 6 is a more filigreed expression of the same site with stacks of wild berry and herb aromas. Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the most beautiful Kastanienbusch of them all? Both are brilliant interpretations of a unique German “grand cru” vineyard site.

If you had asked me a decade ago if a German riesling would one day remind me of Chablis I would have been very skeptical, but this is how I felt about our No. 7 – the Christmann Riesling Pfalz Idig GG 2023. For a German wine it has gigantic power, but this is packed into a sleek silhouette rather than having turned the wine into a bodybuilder. Congratulations to young Sophie Christmann and her father, Steffen. They make a great team!

Muller-Catoir winemaker Martin Franzen and owner-director Philipp Catoir are rightly delighted with all their 2023 vintage wines. It could also be their best vintage since taking over this famous winery with the 2002 vintage. No wonder their Müller-Catoir Riesling Pfalz Bürgergarten Im Breumel GG 2023 clocked in at No. 5. It has a cornucopia of stone and citrus fruits yet is super-elegant and finishes with a wonderful stony freshness. We seriously believe in deliciousness!

The Bürgerspital Riesling Franken Pfülben GG 2022 (No. 10) was one of the biggest surprises of the year. This winery is most famous for dry whites from the Stein site and Stein-Harfe sub-site in Wurzburg, and the Pfulben vineyard site of Randersacker got forgotten a couple of decades ago. Exciting wines from this steep slope with limestone soil were too rare, so the winery director, Robertg Haller, decided to replant it with riesling and used a massal selection from Alsace. The vines that ripened the grapes for this wine were just 12 years old, but it shows that haller made the right call. The Pfulben is back!

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor

Note: The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated in 2024 by the tasters at JamesSuckling.com. You can sort the wines by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.