It’s amazing how many people, including leading producers, still don’t properly understand how the JamesSuckling.com Top 100 lists function, and that has great relevance to this Top 100 Wines of Germany 2025 report. Let me explain.

The fundamental point to make is that this is anything but an exercise in elitism. Instead, our goal is to show you where the best value excellence – of quality and character – is to be found. Therefore, these are never such rare wines that they’re impossible to buy. Only a few hundred bottles for the whole world results in a wine being spread very thin indeed, and though we don’t object to such products our Top 100 reports are about celebrating great wines you can actually buy.

That’s an extremely important point with regard to Germany, because the wine industry has a tradition of micro-bottlings of high-end, nobly sweet wines made from selectively harvested botrytis-affected grapes. In recent years this idea of bottling a small cask separately has been extended to dry wines in order to push quality and exclusivity to the limit.

For the wines on this list, about 2,000 bottles is the absolute minimum production volume required, but the No. 1 to No. 29 wines were all made in significantly higher quantities. We decreased the lower limit compared with previous years because yields were low in the 2024 vintage due to spring frosts and a wet early summer that lead to downy mildew. The spring frosts were so bad in the Saar and Ruwer subregions of the Mosel that no wines qualified.

Also, which wine consumer doesn’t get excited to find an amazing wine for a friendly price? We certainly do, because our budgets are also limited. The reputation of German wines as a whole still hangs behind those of French and Italian wines, and it’s therefore possible to find some spectacular bargains. More about them in just a moment.

We call the third dimension of our Top 100 lists the “wow” factor – something many of you will find self-explanatory. Obviously it has to do with deliciousness and excitement, but for us it also means innovation and the rediscovery of forgotten appellations or individual vineyard sites. We love the return of a hero every bit as much as the arrival of a new hero, and there were plenty of both in Germany the last year!

Of course, the ratings are important, but for our Top 100 lists we see them in relation to production quantity (the more the better!), average retail price as given by WineSearcher.com (the lower the better) and “wow” (bring it on!) It’s great fun putting these lists together, but it’s also a lot of work getting all the necessary information together and figuring out what it means.

The latter task is challenging, because Germany is way more complex than it was when James and I started tasting the country’s wines back in the early 1980s. Back then there were only a handful of producers with one or more high-priced wines. Today there are a bunch of producers who ask several hundred euros (or dollars) for their high-end wines. On the other hand, those same producers usually have entry-level wines costing less than 20 euros.

We decided that the Top 10 German wines this year must all be under $100 retail. In fact, half the Top 10 are under $50. Our German Wine of the Year, the Dönnhoff Riesling Nahe Hermannshöhle Spätlese 2024, is available for just over $50.

The off-dry white is all about the interplay of complex fruit aromas and flavors plus the contrast between spring-like lightness and enormous density. Delicious as it now, it’s a youngster. James and I remember the 1990 vintage as young wines very well and they had a similar structure to this 2024 beauty, so decades of aging are possible if it’s well-cellared.

Many readers will know that this isn’t the first time we have congratulated winemaker Cornelius Donnhoff on his achievements. He has been the winemaker at his family’s winery in the village of Oberhausen (not to be confused with the German industrial city of the same name) in the Nahe since 2007. Donnhoff divides his attention between off-dry and properly dry rieslings, and one of the latter is also in our Top 100.

Another Nahe wine stands out because it’s the best value for money that I encountered during the last year of tasting in Germany, which means close to 2,000 wines. The Tesch Riesling Nahe Karthäuser Trocken 2024 can be had for less than $30, and 10,000 bottles were produced. It is our No. 8 German wine.

That’s amazing value for a wine with so much stony originality and such a big personality. 2024 was the first vintage Johannes Tesch was entirely responsible for the winemaking. Like Cornelius Donnhoff, he is working to refine the winemaking style of his father – in Tesch’s case that’s Martin Tesch and in Donnhoff's it's Helmut Donnhoff – rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

Let’s stick with the Nahe for a moment and consider our No. 7 German wine, the Kruger-Rumpf Riesling Nahe Bingerbrück 1937 Trocken 2024. It tastes like a great GG (Grosses Gewachs), Germany’s unofficial equivalent of Grand Cru in France, but is only a village wine. There’s a story behind that.

In 2015, Georg Rumpf took over some 1937-planted riesling vines in the Abtei vineyard of Bingerbruck, a site with no reputation at all. He was amazed by the power of the dry Abtei he made, so he marketed it under the vineyard name Abtei 1937. Now the complex rules of the elite VDP German producers’ association, to which Kruger-Rumpf belongs, force him to sell it under the village name.

This story reminds me very much of when winemaker Gunter Kunstler made his first great dry rieslings in 1988. Suddenly, the Holle vineyard site of Hochheim was being talked about instead of its much more famous neighbors, the Domdechaney and Kirchenstuck. The Künstler Riesling Rheingau Hölle GG 2024, our No. 2 German wine, is the next episode in this breathtaking story of giant earthy power and great tension.

At No. 3, the Willi Schaefer Riesling Mosel Graacher Domprobst Kabinett 2024 is an overwhelmingly expressive example of this category, marrying natural lightness of body with great brilliance. This is a small winery that has become a cult over the last decade, but this is the largest bottling the husband-and-wife team of Christoph and Andrea Schaefer produced in 2024, so you still have aa chance to find it.

And coming in at No. 4, the Wittmann Riesling Rheinhessen Morstein GG 2024 is the latest vintage of a modern dry wine classic and one of the defining new wines of the Rheinhessen region. Anyone who thinks German riesling is all about slate must try this great expression of a limestone terroir, and how this gives wines with enormous textural complexity.

Two more wines from Rheinhessen follow the Wittmann Morstein GG. Many German winemakers have poured much ambition into perfecting dry whites from the sauvignon blanc grape over the last decade, with a lot of strong and expressive wines the result.

But I’ve never encountered one with the elegance of the No. 5 Weedenborn Sauvignon Blanc Rheinhessen Réserve 2023. All the elements interlock beautifully in this wine, and in spite of its power it clocks in at just 12.5 percent alcohol – lower than most of the competition from around Planet Wine. Unusually for Germany, sauvignon blanc is the main grape variety for winemaker Gesine Roll and she has made the Weedenborn name synonymous with excellence in this category.

Wine No. 6 is from my rising star German winemaker of the year (an unofficial title!) Tobias Knewitz, who made his first wine – a dry silvaner from the 2008 vintage – when he was still a teenager. He is now assisted by his brother, Bjorn, and his wife, Corina.

Their Knewitz Riesling Rheinhessen Hundertgulden GG 2024 reminds me of a Grand Cru white Burgundy, but the amazing texture is married to Mirabelle plum and fresh citrus aromas, plus crisp acidity, all of which are totally Germanic.

Some of Germany’s best producers tend to get ignored, simply because they’ve been making extraordinary wines for so long. Muller-Catoir in the Pfalz is a perfect example of this. The Müller-Catoir Riesling Pfalz Bürgergarten Im Breummel 2024 at No. 9 is simultaneously delightful and exciting, sleek for this rather warm region but with spectacular depth and drive. 2024 was Martin Franzen’s last vintage as winemaker at Müller-Catoir, which he joined in 2002.

Reinhard Lowenstein of Heymann-Lowenstein in the Terrassenmosel section of the Mosel region often gets taken for granted for similar reasons, but the fact is his wines have never been better than they are today. The Heymann-Löweinstein Riesling Mosel Stolzenberg GG 2024 (No. 10) is a kaleidoscopic expression of an underrated vineyard site that you could spend hours studying, and like our German Wine of the Year, it is also great value for money.

And what about perfect wines in the Top 100 Germany 2025? Just five 100-point wines were produced in big-enough quantities to make the list, but their three-figure prices kept all of them out of the Top 10. The Dr. Loosen Riesling Mosel Erdener Prälat GG Réserve 2019 (a new release and giant of tropical fascination) was the highest-placed, at No. 11, followed by the No. 12 Robert Weil Riesling Rheingau Monte Vacano Trocken 2023, with its cornucopia of wet-stone, salty and herbal flavors.

Both are relatively new creations, with the first vintage of the Dr. Loosen wine occurring in 2011 and Robert Weil's first happening in 2018. They are the first dry whites from each producer to score 100 points, an honor that also extends to wine No. 13, the Bernhard Huber Chardonnay Baden Schlossberg GG 2023, Germany's first perfect-scoring chardonnay.

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated over the last 12 months by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team. You can sort the wines below by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.