The Keller Family Has Dedicated A Lifetime To Reviving Rheinhessen’s Name. Now, Two Generations Are Opening The Doors To The Golden Age Of German Sekt & Wine. Weingut Keller's Klaus-Peter & Felix Tell Us What Comes After Germany’s Greatest Dry Riesling

“When you imagine that the monks have already worked those vineyards in 700 AD… we are one small dot in history, and we are very grateful that we have the ability to do it.”

– Klaus-Peter Keller, Owner and Winemaker at Weingut Keller, Flörsheim-Dalsheim

Felix Keller and his father, Klaus-Peter Keller (Source: Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter e.V.)

Klaus-Peter Keller possesses a deep sense of historical humility. He would clarify that some of his unusual vine-growing methods were already in use over two centuries ago; this family was just bringing them back in Zellertal. It only seems new to modern eyes because our time on Earth is limited. “We hope in our 80- or 90-year lifespans we could influence what happens in world history. In the end, we should not consider ourselves too important.”

For a family that has arguably reached the top of the wine world, there is no self-importance in the room at all.

Since 1789, Weingut Keller has been farming in Flörsheim-Dalsheim, in the south-west corner of Rheinhessen. Ten generations later, the family continues to tend to the original Oberer Hubacker vineyard that has never once been divided.

The estate’s G-Max Riesling is the most sought-after dry Riesling in the world today.

Their reds have gone the same way: the 2014 Morstein Spätburgunder “Felix” was auctioned for around 700 euros a bottle, the most ever paid for a German Pinot Noir. The estate’s Niersteiner Hipping Riesling was also poured at Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations - Her Majesty was "deeply touched" by it.

The Kellers will not sit still for the growing heap of compliments and accolades from the wine world. Klaus-Peter sometimes feels “nearly embarrassed”, because the attention that the estate receives today skips the nine generations that have done important work before him. Even the dry Riesling that the estate’s modern reputation is built upon was made possible only by Mother Nature, who now allows for more reliable ripening seasons.

There’s also great respect towards other growers and the larger culture of German wine. Klaus-Peter constantly reminds us that Rheinhessen came back through the collective effort of its once-scrappy growers, his father and himself included. Jancis Robinson once wrote in glowing regard about an instance during the pandemic when Klaus-Peter eagerly volunteered to curate for importers wines from other German estates that he believed deserved more attention.

(From left) Klaus-Peter, Felix, and Julia Keller (Source: Weingut Keller)

What follows is our interview with Klaus-Peter and Felix Keller that runs the length of the legendary Rheinhessen estate’s story: a childhood spent in the vines; a 9-year-old Felix’s first wine; the medieval church records that led a father and son to the Abtserde; a blueprint to Keller’s incredible array of wines; and the golden age of German sparkling wine that Klaus-Peter and Felix hope to bring back.

A Note to the Reader and Fans of Weingut Keller:

If you find yourself in Germany this November 2026, Weingut Keller is slated to auction the coveted Nierstein Pettenthal GG and Schubertslay GG in cases of 3 each in the next VDP Auction on 7th November 2026! More details to be found on the official VDP website.

The next Bellas Weinbar pop-up event (organised by Felix and Bella Keller) will happen on 5th and 7th November 2026 at Weingut Keller's estate. Weingut Keller cordially invites any wine lover to book a ticket. More details on Instagram (@bellesvignes).

"You need an outside view to see what might be a nice idea to adapt or to try out."

– Felix Keller, 10th Generation Winemaker at Weingut Keller

[88 Bamboo]: To go back to the beginning. Klaus-Peter, by your own telling you were ‘a winemaker’s boy through and through’, the child who threw his school bag into the corner and headed straight out to the vines with his parents, and who on Saturday mornings would climb into a laden van at four in the morning to knock on the doors of last year’s customers across Germany with the new vintage. Two generations on, the world makes that journey to Dalsheim instead.

Klaus-Peter, we would like you to take us back into one specific scene from those early years, a morning in the vines or on the road with your father. Could you tell us how the meaning of this place has changed for you sentimentally, from the boy in that van to the winemaker the wine world now travels to meet?

[Klaus-Peter]: I think there’s still a lot from this boy left, because when you are outside in the vineyards, it’s the same joy and the same pleasure and also the same thrill to experience and to prepare the next vintage.

As a schoolboy, I can also tell you a little secret: you are not always so enthusiastic when your parents tell you at three o’clock, when you come home from school, ‘Now, first three hours in the vineyard, and then we have dinner, and after dinner you can do your homework.’ And when others could play soccer or could play with friends, or party the whole night during weekends, I was driving, delivering wine to customers. It was not always so easy, but it was necessary, because I’m ninth generation. Felix is tenth generation, and we had to build up something.

My father married my mother in 1971. In 1972, with climate change (it started in the 1970s to become a little bit warmer here), he realised the potential of the vineyards here. My mother came from the Mosel, and she brought her Riesling vines to the Hubacker. She only agreed to come to Rheinhessen when she was allowed to plant her Riesling selections here in the Hubacker. So they both invested lots of time. They did not know weekends. It was a lot of hard work. But also, they were very passionate.

And I think as young children, we were also infected by this passion. We knew that when we wanted to reach the next level, we had to invest a lot, and so it was a really great time. Our parents never had a lot of time for us children.

Even at two or three years old, we were playing in the vineyards. They were working; we were playing in the vineyards. So we grew up in the vineyards. A few years later, they were still working, and we supported them. We helped with the work, so that was basically our childhood.

But when I remember, they were beautiful times, because our parents were always around. In other families, the parents are also hard-working, but they are twelve hours away and come home when the children are already sleeping. And here, they did not really have time for us, but they were always around, and that’s a feeling that you never, never forget.

Klaus-Peter Keller and Julia Keller (Source: Weingut Keller)

And it was a little bit similar for Felix and Max when they grew up, because also when I got married to Julia in 1997, there was, and there is, always a lot to do in a winery. So today it’s basically the same feeling. We know that the reputation of the area and of the winery is different from what it was 50 years ago. But basically, I still feel like this young guy who can improve from year to year. Felix is laughing because I’m calling myself the young guy, he thinks I’m the old guy already.

The good thing is, wine growing never gets boring, because every year is a new challenge, a new thrill, and you don’t know what to expect. That makes it so nice.

[88 Bamboo]: Felix, the same level of immersion clearly shaped you. You have said you were in the vineyards early with your parents and, wonderfully, that you fermented your first grapes yourself at nine years old, with the rule that ‘Papa wasn’t allowed to taste until the cork was in the bottle’. What is your own earliest memory of the estate as something you belonged to, and what was it like to grow up as the tenth generation in a house where three generations work the same rows?

[Felix]: Sure. What I remember is me being two, three years old, in the cellar together with my father during harvest. I played a bit next to the work. That’s maybe the oldest memory I have.

But growing up in the vineyard, it’s all about getting to know all the work. So from the very beginning, from when I was a small kid, I really got in touch with it. In a way, I apprenticed from being very little.

It’s been a great pleasure, and I think it’s pretty similar to what Klaus-Peter had in mind before. I grew up the same way, and I really enjoyed being in the vineyards and in the cellar, and that’s how it also worked with my own little projects. We actually have some liquid proof of that, which is still drinking very nicely – it was made in 2007.

[Klaus-Peter]: And I remember one very nice scene when Felix came home, perhaps age 12, as a schoolboy, and he was not really allowed to drink. Well, he perhaps got a drop to taste. It was more about smelling.

But we always had apprentices from all over the world sitting at the lunch table, and this time it was a young student who had studied at the University of California, Davis. She was perhaps 21, 22, and in the US you start to drink wine at 21. So she knew all the theory about wine, but not really how great wine had to taste.

Klaus-Peter and Julia's eldest son, Felix, made his first batch of wine at the tender age of 9 (Source: Klaus-Peter Keller) 

And little schoolboy Felix, perhaps age 12, 13, came home from school, and we had our daily blind tasting on the lunch table, and everybody was guessing what it could be, what it might be. And Felix just asked me, ‘Oh, Papa, can you pass me the glass?’ And he only smelled it and said, ‘Dad! It’s again the 1996,’ and we lifted the bottle, and it really was a 1996.

And you must have seen the face of this UC Davis student, who said, ‘Bah, I finished my master’s, and here a 12-year-old schoolboy tells me how a great Riesling has to taste.’ So that’s real life when you grow up with wine.

“When the cork is in the bottle, we immediately start thinking about what we could have done better.”

–Klaus-Peter on never being satisfied

[88 Bamboo]: Klaus-Peter, your path ran through Geisenheim and then Burgundy, where you interned at Armand Rousseau in Gevrey-Chambertin and with the Ligniers in Morey-Saint-Denis. You have said it was there, seeing how deeply the Church had shaped Burgundy’s vineyards, that you began to wonder about your own region, which set you and your father hunting through medieval texts, and led you to the discovery that the Hügelland’s best slopes had been prized by monks in the fourteenth century.

Was there any moment (perhaps when in those archives or with a particular dry Riesling in the glass) when it became clear to you that your family’s limestone would make dry Rieslings that could stand among the world’s greatest? How did that realisation come to you?

[Klaus-Peter]: First of all, I was really inspired not only by how deeply people in Burgundy were into history and everything, but also by the appreciation for just good food and good wine in France, which I really liked a lot. The love for old vines, for small yields, for these tiny plots, where 30 metres further it’s the next vineyard site that can taste completely different and has its own character. And we talked a lot about these small plots that differ in taste.

After coming home from Burgundy, I was really inspired. We did a lot of research about our different soils and the history of the soils. That was also the time when we discovered the Abtserde, because the Abtserde was not a vineyard name anymore. It is called Brunnenhäuschen today, but the old name hundreds of years ago was ‘abbot’s earth’, the place of the abbots. And always when a vineyard name has a connection to the church, it is often a special place, because the church always knew where the best plots are.

And then yes, for sure we did a lot of research on vineyards in Westhofen, Morstein, Abtserde, but also now when it comes to the Zellertal, so the more recent developments of the last ten years, we found out that the first vineyards in the Zellertal were already worked by the monks in 708 AD. There are old writings that show you the first vineyard documents, 708 AD, and that’s really crazy.

And it makes you feel so little. We have over 200 years of history as a winery and ten generations, and it sounds so long. When you imagine that the monks have already worked those vineyards in 700 AD, it’s really: we are one small dot in history, and we are very grateful that we have the ability to do it.

[88 Bamboo]: Felix, your own training took you outward before it brought you home: a year with Mathieu Kauffmann at Reichsrat von Buhl, where you have said the ‘Sekt virus’ first took hold, then Bérèche in Champagne and Julian Haart on the Mosel, before Geisenheim. You have described how, from around 2015, it became clear you would pursue this professionally.

When did it turn from ‘this is the family’s work’ into ‘this is my calling’? And was there a particular moment (maybe a disgorgement, a wine, a conversation with a mentor), when the craft itself became a purpose for you?

[Felix]: Actually, I never questioned that. It’s more like I knew from being a little child that I wanted to be a part of our family business.

For me it was important to have something to develop by myself, to try out, and that was the sparkling, because it’s something we never had before in the history of the winery, and it inspired me a lot. Also, the technical process of producing sparkling is completely different compared to producing still wine.

(Source: Klaus-Peter)

[Klaus-Peter]: And we have a great tradition for sparkling in the region. Many growers who are today in Champagne come from Germany. Some even from Rheinhessen. In 1843, Johann-Joseph Krug went over from Mainz in Rheinhessen and founded Maison Krug. We have lots of French roots in our region!

[Felix]: Many of the big houses are sourcing from Rheinhessen, and we also have a big tradition, for example, for Pinot Meunier, which has also been home-based in our region for a very long time. Some even say they are not sure if Pinot Meunier came from Rheinhessen to Champagne. It’s quite interesting to see.

[Klaus-Peter]: I think it’s always important. When I came home from Burgundy, my first topic here was Pinot Noir. But in the end, it’s always the family who cares for everything. We are doing the vineyards together. We are harvesting together. My first approach was Pinot Noir. My father was more caring for Riesling, and it is very good when the young generation is not being judged only by what the father or grandfather did.

(Source: Weingut Keller)

When Felix came and said, ‘Hey, Sekt is already a culture here in the region’ (but it was 150 years ago), ‘my approach would be to try to bring sparkling to brilliance here again,’ we said, ‘Hey, it’s a very good idea,’ because no one will compare Felix to what we, my generation, did, or to what my father did. That was his own approach, and that was what we really liked.

[Felix]: But I think it’s that way all the time: if any one of us has a new idea, we discuss it together and take a decision whether to do it or not. And it’s very important to keep improving all the time, and to keep questioning what we are doing. 

[Klaus-Peter]: When the cork is in the bottle, we immediately start thinking about what we could have done better. That’s our motivation for the next year. And that’s not only the family: behind the family, it’s always a strong team, and we have a very good team with passionate people who are thinking the same way.

My father had already started with it, and now in the last 40 years, we’ve had at least 70, 80 young apprentices here at our lunch table doing blind tastings. At the moment, Felix’s wife Bella is doing her Master of Wine, and she brings a whole armful of bottles every day for blind tastings. It’s very important for us also to pass our knowledge to the next generation.

We think that’s one of the really fantastic things that made this whole development in Rheinhessen possible: that the growers work together, not against each other. That was perhaps 60, 70 years ago, the older generation, but now our generation and the next generation with Felix. The real strength of this generation is that they exchange.

[Felix]: We often sit together in the evenings, trying the wines with all our friends, discussing. That’s very important to keep going forward together.

“Felix just asked me, ‘Oh, Papa, can you pass me the glass?’ And he only smelled it and said, ‘Dad! It’s again the 1996,’ and we lifted the bottle, and it really was a 1996.”

–Klaus-Peter on Felix, aged twelve, at the blind tasting table

[88 Bamboo]: Klaus-Peter, I understand that your grandfather once gave your own father a stark choice: leave school before the Abitur, or the vineyard would be sold. He chose the land. Total commitment, it seems, has always been the price of this place. Today, the wines increasingly carry the next generation’s names, G-Max for Maximilian, and the Felix Spätburgunder, which we understand was moved to Morstein because the wine bearing a son’s name should come from the finest site.

Klaus-Peter, could you share with us one specific moment of working with your family, whether in the vines or the cellar, that you find yourself treasuring? And beyond any technique, what are the key values you most want to hand on to the next generation?

[Klaus-Peter]: The most important thing, and also the nicest moment, is our gift for good work over the whole season: when we can harvest good fruit. You see, a lot can happen: frost, too much rain or not enough rain, heat waves or hail. This makes you feel humble and grateful when in mid-September you have beautiful Pinot Noir or Riesling hanging on the vines, and when you can harvest those grapes with the family.

(Source: Weingut Keller)

My father is with us. Felix and his wife are with us. My brother and his children. My brother has a completely different job. He’s a consultant, but during harvest, he’s always with us in the vineyards for a few days, and then friends join for sure. My wife Julia is with us, the team. That’s really a beautiful moment, and I love it a lot, to be with passionate people outside.

And we all have the motivation. We want to give our best because we love to drink the future wine. That’s our main motivation, and therefore the focus on the little details. Sometimes we say, ‘Oh, we only go for the tiny barrels,’ or sometimes we have ideas where we say, ‘This parcel here, perhaps we wait a little bit longer, and take this one a little bit earlier.’ These are ideas that develop, discussing them with the family and the team.

Those are really the most precious moments we have during the year, and I can only hope it stays that way, but I’m sure it will, because I know how much Felix and Bella appreciate those moments as well. That’s really a very important key for future good quality and for what Keller is. It’s a place for passionate people who really see every new vintage as a new challenge to improve and to be perhaps this tiny, tiny little bit better if possible, and that’s our motivation and our sense of life.

[88 Bamboo]: Felix, on a personal note, congratulations on your recent wedding to Isabella, which joins two lives already lived in wine: she founded a fine-wine merchant and is now reading for the Master of Wine, and together you created Bellas Weinbar, a pop-up that drew many to the estate last November and opened the cellar door to a wider, younger crowd.

What are you and Isabella doing to change the way people, especially those of your own generation, meet Keller wines?

[Felix]: I think it’s very important to create an opportunity to discuss with people, to give them the chance to get to know our wines, but also from older vintages. That’s also what we do through the wine bar, because we always put some wines on the list from our treasury.

And it’s more about giving them a reason to share with other wine lovers. Younger people are more into drinking together than drinking just at home alone with your wife or girlfriend. And it’s changed a bit. I grew up a bit differently, because we as a family were always used to drinking a bottle of wine every evening. But it’s more about socialising and drinking together.

(From left) Isabella Keller-Rutayungwa - Felix's wife - Felix, Klaus-Peter and Julia Keller (Source: Weingut Keller)

[Klaus-Peter]: I have a little bit of the view from the outside. But I think Felix and Bella are really doing a brilliant job, because you have to imagine with this wine bar in November: it’s around the VDP auction days, and normally the VDP auction was more a thing for the guys 50, 60 and older. But Felix and Bella thought, hey, we will make our wine bar exactly in those days.

[Felix]: Our average age is below 35 for the people coming to the wine bar. So it’s a lot of guys, our age or even younger, joining us to really enjoy very nice bottles. Also because we try to keep it at a very reasonable price. Most of the wines you wouldn’t find for that price on any wine list in restaurants. And it’s not about money. It’s just about sharing.

Felix and Belle created the Bellas Weinbar, a pop-up bar that regularly brings throves of wine lovers to the estate (Source: Bellas Weinbar)

[Klaus-Peter]: It’s not only about our wine. It’s wine from Lamy from Burgundy, D’Arcy and Burlotto from Piedmont, from Mosel, from Champagne, from Rheingau. In the kitchen there’s Felix or Bella cooking, and they have one friend who goes hunting. Sometimes they make a venison goulash, and that is served on nice plates, and then people choose wine to go with it and fetch three bottles because it’s so nice in price, and share it with people they don’t know. And after two or three hours, everybody knows each other and everybody shares bottles with each other. And that’s exactly the atmosphere that we love.

(Source: Bellas Weinbar)

Wine brings people together. We have so many problems on our planet at the moment. It’s just like a peaceful place where you have the feeling: here, human values are really important. It’s friendship. It’s sharing. It’s nice talks. And that’s what makes this wine bar so special.

[Felix]: Through our customers, there are now a lot of people becoming friends through the wine bar. It’s so funny. They began coming, sitting at the table only the two of them, and now it’s big tables with 10 or 15 people knowing each other really well. It’s such a nice spot to socialise and enjoy together.

It’s a new wine bar. So I guess this year will be the first time we have to limit the space because otherwise it will be too crazy.

“…it is very good when the young generation is not being judged only by what the father or grandfather did.”

–Klaus-Peter on making room for the tenth generation

[88 Bamboo]: Under your father, Klaus senior, the estate was celebrated for traditional off-dry and sweet Riesling, the styles its loyal customers came for, and he kept faith with Riesling when much of Rheinhessen had pulled it out for higher-yielding crossings. Returning from Burgundy, Klaus-Peter, you saw that the family’s limestone could do something it had never been asked for: profound dry Riesling. It was a gamble on two fronts, artistic and commercial, with, as Julia has put it, ‘some difficult conversations around the kitchen table about what we could afford to do’, and even a cautious start (you have recalled your father holding the Kirchspiel name off the label after two difficult vintages). The switch became real when the first Grosses Gewächs and the first G-Max both appeared, and the wines that once risked alienating the estate’s traditional customers became the jewels of the cellar.

Klaus-Peter, the constraints your family had in mind feel so relatable especially to small business owners around the world no matter of industry, which is such a stark contrast to how legendary the Keller name is today. Could you take us to those difficult conversations and share with us particularly what you were feeling at the time, and what tipped you over to the edge and gave you the conviction that dry Riesling was the estate’s true calling, at a time when the market, and understandably your father, urged caution? Was there ever a back-up plan or what did you make of the consequences you were of course ultimately willing to bear had it not worked out?

[Klaus-Peter]: Nature is our boss, and I said it before. You can’t do anything against nature.

We have a famous pharmacist who travelled the Rhine region already over 150 years ago, and he wrote about our region: it’s beautiful soil, and great wines would be possible here if the climate were a little bit warmer and the grapes could reach full maturity every year. This guy was called Johann Philipp Bronner, and he wrote the history of Rhine wine. He already discovered 150 years ago how great the potential for great wines would be here, but it was too early.

It was not only Riesling, dry Riesling, that was discussed. When I came home from Burgundy, I asked my grandfather and father to plant Pinot Noir in the Frauenberg vineyard. Frauenberg is now very famous, 30 years after.

When I asked my grandfather to plant Pinot Noir in the Frauenberg, he did not say no. But he was really afraid. He said, ‘There was never Pinot Noir in the Frauenberg that reached full maturity. It was rather a rosé than a red wine. And Frauenberg is so exposed to the wind and it’s so cool.’ I said, ‘Grandpa, it’s not the old genetics you were planting with 80 or 100 hectolitres per hectare yield. I want 30, 35 hectolitres, a low yield, and I want exactly this coolness, this wind: when it’s humid, it dries the berries immediately.’ There were also discussions about the spot where we planted Pinot, if it would reach full maturity. Nowadays, it’s not a problem.

The same thing was with Riesling in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. My father would also have liked it. He loved dry wine, but he understood that if you harvest the Riesling with 13, 14, 15 grams of acidity, it’s just too high to ferment those grapes completely dry, because it would be a very sour wine. And you never can work against nature. Therefore, you had to balance the acidity with sweetness, or you had to add a partner to the Riesling, like, for example, Silvaner, to bring it down a little bit in acidity.

The Rheinhessen region where Weingut Keller is based (Source: Falstaff)

And again, this is not new. This was already done 130, 140, 150 years ago. Nierstein is a warm spot we have in Rheinhessen, but if you go 100 years back, also in Nierstein they already planted a little bit of Silvaner together with Riesling, or a little bit of Gewürztraminer together with Riesling. We also had in the 1930s, 1940s, Gewürztraminer together with Riesling in the Hubacker, because the Gewürztraminer gave the flavour, but at the same time it lowered the acidity.

The Keller Niersteiner Hipping Riesling was poured at Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee celebrations at Buckingham Palace (Source: 1erste Hong Kong) 

So the question of dry wine is not only that I wanted to do it, but nature gave us the opportunity to do it, and that was the most important thing. The old generation, my father and my grandfather, they knew that. For example, in the Hubacker, as they told me, they harvested the Riesling after the first snow, vineyards with no leaves anymore, only the grapes hanging.

Now we have completely different times, and the opportunity to make great Riesling was never so good as at the moment, and also for the wine lovers, it’s a fantastic time, not only in Rheinhessen, also in the Mosel and Pfalz region and Rheingau. [In the past] you perhaps had one or two outstanding vintages per decade. Now, you normally don’t have off vintages anymore if you don’t have frost or hail, because the grapes reach good maturity. Sometimes it’s a little bit more humid or not humid enough, but it’s small details. Those vintages we have at the moment would all be considered very good to outstanding 30, 40, 50 years ago.

So it’s normal that you are always discussing within the family. But also my grandfather and my father, they were interested only to make the best possible of what we have, and if we have the opportunity to make a great dry Riesling, my father was the first to say, ‘Let’s go for it,’ but perhaps a little bit careful, not from 20 per cent to 80 per cent in one year, but let’s see what nature allows, what is possible.

“…always when a vineyard name has a connection to the church, it is often a special place, because the church always knew where the best plots are.”

–Klaus-Peter on uncovering monastic records on vineyards

[88 Bamboo]: If there is one word that explains why your dry wines taste as they do, it is rock. Most of your land lies in the Wonnegau on limestone that was once the floor of a warm sea, the same calcareous family that runs beneath Burgundy’s Côte d’Or, which is part of why the Montrachet comparison keeps returning. Yet each of your grand crus seems to speak in its own accent: Morstein, documented as a vineyard as far back as 1282, with heavy clay marl over water-bearing limestone, is spoken of as the powerhouse; Kirchspiel, sheltered and opening like an amphitheatre toward the Rhine, as the more poised and delicate; and Abtserde, the ‘abbot’s earth’ recorded around 1280, with the highest active lime of any site in Westhofen, a terra rossa stained red with iron and a spring running beneath it, as the most coiled and cellar-demanding, a wine the estate itself says needs a decade.

Give us the blueprint to understanding Keller’s incredible array of wine cuvées. Could you take our readers through how the limestone speaks differently in the glass across your top sites (say Hubacker, Morstein, Kirchspiel and Abtserde)?

[Klaus-Peter]: Now our big gift is really that we have different kinds of limestone. For example, our home vineyard is the Hubacker. My grandfather drove to the Hubacker over four winters, blasted rocks from the vineyard, collected the stones, and the main parts of our house are built with Hubacker rock.

The Hubacker rock is a yellow limestone that always brings a noble intense peachy fruit with some smokiness in it. It is 40, 50 centimetres of clay topsoil and then yellow limestone, which always brings a nice power, but also a nice mineral core to it.

The estate's iconic Hubacker vineyard.

We started in Westhofen because my wife Julia is from Westhofen, and we thought it would be a good idea to spread the risk a little bit. The four hectares of Hubacker were our only Riesling vineyard, and when it is hit by hail or by whatever, you have a big problem. Therefore, we thought the six-kilometre drive to Westhofen would be a very good thing to split the risk a little bit.

We directly fell in love with Kirchspiel, because Kirchspiel has nearly no clay topsoil, only 20 centimetres, and then you have direct limestone rock, often a white limestone rock, sometimes a little bit red by iron. It’s tänzerisch (light-footed / graceful). It’s very elegant. It’s precise. It’s minty.

And it’s a strong contrast to Morstein with its blue clay on limestone rock. A very heavy soil in Morstein. You have underground sources that always bring enough water to the plants. It’s a powerful strong wine with a deep mineral core. Now it is adapted very well to these little bit drier years where you don’t get as much rain as perhaps you sometimes got 30, 40 years ago. Morstein nearly never has problems with water supply.

Abtserde grapes in hand (Source: Weingut Keller)

And in between Morstein and Kirchspiel, you have the Abtserde, and Abtserde has a little bit of both. Abtserde’s western part is terra rossa soil, so a red soil, very rich in iron. The eastern part of Abtserde is very high in active limestone, so a lot of energy, a lot of precision. Here you get these yellow fruit flavours, and if you combine the red part with the white part, you get the aristocratic silkiness of the red soil and the energy of the white soil, and that’s just a beautiful combination.

It’s just a gift to have such great vineyards, and so different vineyards, close by.

[Felix]: So you will really see it’s not just about limestone; it’s really about a lot of different shapes of limestone, which, in a way, even surprised us, because we didn’t expect it to be that different when we rented a small Caterpillar and dug up the soils.

I think what is different to Burgundy is that the soil changes very fast for us. So we have very small plots where you have a soil type, and it can change from one plot to another completely, as for example with the Abtserde. Burgundy, I think, might be a bit more homogeneous.

Also, when it comes to the Zellertal, we had a look at a lot of geological maps and looked through a lot of old books to see what the monks considered to be the best soils, where you have a lot of clay to keep the water. So there was a lot of planning in the winter season when we had some rainy days, before we acquired new plots.

“…the question of dry wine is not only that I wanted to do it, but nature gave us the opportunity to do it, and that was the most important thing.”

–Klaus-Peter on who really turned Rheinhessen dry

[88 Bamboo]: You have said the family thinks of itself first as growers, and that the obsession lives in the vineyard, following Hans-Günter Schwarz’s maxim of ‘activism in the vineyard, minimalism in the cellar’. The detail is remarkable: only fruit from vines at least twenty-five years old goes into the single-vineyard dry wines, with younger fruit diverted to Von der Fels; the canopy is tuned plot by plot to how much water the ground holds, with more leaves pulled in sunny Nierstein than in cool Westhofen; and the grapes finish late, often in November, yet the dry Rieslings rarely climb above thirteen per cent alcohol. For the top wines the bunches rest on their skins for up to a day before a slow turn in an old vertical basket press.

Given the diversity of the plots and the inherent multi-faceted nature of producing Rieslings along the range, what would you say is the littlest detail that shows up in the wine that is nevertheless the most effort intensive in producing?

[Felix]: I think we look at every plot as an individual. So even if we have six, seven, eight plots in a vineyard site, it’s all vinified separately, because we know in different years a plot would show completely differently. It’s so important to have these small little pieces.

But it’s also about the vineyard work. We never treat the vineyards the same way every year, so it’s always about thinking of the water stress, of the berry size, of the rootstock, of the genetic material that’s planted there. It’s such a complex thing to go through.

(Source: Weingut Keller)

[Klaus-Peter]: To know about these differences, you must know your vineyard very well, because every year is different. And you must know where this layer of clay is that perhaps keeps water a little bit better than in the parcel 50 metres away.

[Felix]: We would even stop doing soil work in the middle of the row because we know the upper part of the vineyard is more clay-rich and can keep more water. The lower part has maybe less topsoil, so we need to do some soil work.

[Klaus-Peter]: Sometimes we even make little drawings or paintings showing how we will pick this special plot, because we say on the top of the plot, it’s a little bit more fertile. In the end, perhaps a little bit too fertile. When it’s, for example, 22 rows, we only take the 16 rows on the left side, but without the first 12 vines on top and without the last 10 at the bottom, because there it is a little bit more fertile.

So we really try to get the best out of every parcel. This precision you can only gain when you have such a plot for many years, and when you are really deep into it, and when you know your job must be your first hobby. Then you do things like this.

We have the rule when something new is coming to the estate, when a new plot is interesting, because we say perhaps it’s beautiful soil, it’s lying high up the hill, so it could be great also for the next 50, 80 years. Then the next point is: what do we give away? What do we rent away for it? Because we don’t want to lose the focus.

We are a restaurant with 25, 30 seats, and with 30 seats you can offer the best possible ingredients. You get the best fish. You get the best meat. You get the best service. The best, just-in-time ingredients to prepare. When you say, because demand is high, ‘I will increase my restaurant to 60 seats and open a terrace with 120 seats,’ you lose focus a little bit.

[Felix]: You lose quality in the end. We had one point where we added a little part for the sparkling to the winery, but since then it’s only about changing to plots being better adapted to the future, maybe also plots being more interesting soil-wise.

And what we mainly did is to give away plots with Pinot Blanc and with Pinot Gris. We think they are not as well adapted to the climate as, for example, Chardonnay, Pinot, and Riesling are. So those are our main changes in the last years.

[Klaus-Peter]: And Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc don’t transport soil so precisely and so well into the bottle as a Pinot Noir or Chardonnay does. And therefore we thought, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc – away.

[Felix]: You can’t only rely on one variety because the harvest window is getting smaller and smaller, and we wouldn’t be able to pick all the plots at the right time if we had 100% Riesling.

(Source: Weingut Keller)

[Klaus-Peter]: Or we would need an incredible amount of people, 60, 80 people. Then you can harvest it in two weeks. But for us, it makes much more sense to work in smaller groups. We start perhaps to pick with 10, 12 people, for the sparkling. Then perhaps we are 15, 18 people, family, friends, team, to pick the Pinot Noir, starting to pick the Chardonnay.

So we really try to keep it small, so that you don’t have people who have to work and are only doing it because they have to earn money. They want to do it because they are passionate about it. That’s the most important thing. Because with everything you do in your life, you can feel and you can taste passion. The same fish prepared by a chef who is passionate about it and by a chef who is not passionate about it, you can taste it. A nice fruit from the garden: if somebody passionate grew it, you can taste the difference. And the same is with wine.

We want passionate people around us, and therefore, not focusing only on one variety is really important. And for sure, nature offers it, because we have the soil and the climate for it, and that’s the most important thing. Because when you don’t have the soil and climate for it, then for sure you are nearly forced to do 100 per cent one direction. But when you have the possibility, and we are very grateful that we have it, then you can rely a little bit on three or four different varieties.

[88 Bamboo]: Riesling is about seventy per cent of what you make, and it falls into two families. The first is the dry wines: Von der Fels (‘from the rock’), a blend of younger-vine fruit from your top sites and your own everyday drinking wine; the blended Limestone; the six single-vineyard Grosses Gewächs, Hubacker, Abts E, Morstein, Kirchspiel, Hipping and Pettenthal, each the voice of one slope; and the rare G-Max. The second is the off-dry and sweet wines, where your mother’s Mosel heritage shows: the off-dry RR; the featherlight Kabinetts, among them the ‘Alte Reben’ from the old ungrafted vines of the Schubertslay above the Mosel; and the sweeter Prädikat Rieslings, from Spätlese and Auslese to the rare Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese, with the Rieslaner Auslese you keep as a ‘Hommage an Hedi’ close beside them. Together they are a family of different voices of the same limestone.

Klaus-Peter, for those new to your wines, staring down this cathedral of the world’s greatest Rieslings, it might seem daunting as to where to start and how to proceed. Could you be our guide to these two families, taking us through what each wine is for and how a newcomer should best find their way among them, from the everyday to the wines built for the cellar, and from bone-dry to gently sweet?

[Klaus-Peter]: Today, between 80 and 90 per cent of the wines produced are dry, for sure depending a little bit on the vintage.

I would recommend to somebody who is new to our wines, Riesling-wise, to start with the Riesling Von der Fels. Because a Von der Fels has all the grand crus inside, the little bit younger vines, perhaps 20, 25 years, 30 years in average age. But a Von der Fels shows the liveliness, the minerality of the limestone rock soils. And if you like a Von der Fels, you can even let it mature and age for 10, 15 years, and it’s a great price value.

And for us, it’s important. We have also here a lot of young students around in Mainz, in Heidelberg, in Wiesbaden, in Frankfurt, and for us it’s important that we have a wine that is in some way affordable and at really high quality. If those young students or some young wine lovers or people who come new to our estate want to stay at the Von der Fels level, they can be happy drinkers their whole life. It’s fantastic.

(Source: Sotheby's)

But if you want to go to the next step, from the very old vines, you can have the Kirchspiel with its dancing minerality, an Abtserde with its silkiness and this deep mineral core, or Morstein with its power, or the auction wine from Pettenthal from red slate soils (Pettenthal Riesling GG). In the end, that is up to your personal preference and also for sure for the money you want to spend. But I think a Von der Fels is a beautiful introduction to the dry Riesling.

On auction in November 2026: Schubertslay GG 2025 (from 125-year-old vines) and Pettenthal GG 2025. (Source: Klaus-Peter Keller)

For sweet, I would say a Limestone Kabinett with really low alcohol. Some people nowadays are discussing drinking less alcohol. I say, hey, you don’t have to drink less; just drink a little bit lighter. And German Kabinett is a perfect answer to this question, because with a Kabinett, 7.5, 8 degrees of alcohol, that’s not the 15, 16 degrees you sometimes have from other warmer countries. It’s feather-light. It’s elegant, and it’s not really sweet because it has pronounced acidity. It’s beautiful with sushi. It can go with chicken with a spicy sauce. You can combine it beautifully with many dishes.

(Source: Melbourne Wine House)

And so the Kabinett range starts with a Limestone, and if you want to climb the ladder, you can go to an Abts E Kabinett or to a Hipping Kabinett. You have all the possibilities. You can have an aged Spätlese or Auslese. In some vintages, you have a Trockenbeerenauslese, which can age for 50 and more years. So you really have all the possibilities.

“We are a restaurant with 25, 30 seats, and with 30 seats you can offer the best possible ingredients.”

–Klaus-Peter on why the estate refuses to grow any larger

[88 Bamboo]: Felix, much has been said about how the younger generation interprets wines completely differently. As someone from the new generation of wine drinkers, do you see this differently? Where do you think a beginner should start with your wines, and why’s that?

[Felix]: I think I see it the same way as KP does, because we have the possibility to give you the chance to try a wine at very nice value with Von der Fels, but the same also for our newly added Chardonnay with the Talfels or with the Spätburgunder Réserve. So that’s the best way to access our wines. Also, because it’s quantity-wise a bit more accessible to people.

[88 Bamboo]: Klaus-Peter, most of your labels follow the VDP’s official classification, but RR sits outside it: a small pocket of red soil within Kirchspiel that never ferments fully dry, so rather than push it to the bone-dry standard a Grosses Gewächs requires, you bottle its natural, off-dry result as RR.

Where the land refuses to follow the rulebook, do you follow the land? How do you make this decision? And are there other wines where you’ve let the parcel’s nature, not the classification, have the final word?

[Klaus-Peter]: Generally, I’m a big fan of a little bit of a positive revolution. So not everything has to fit a certain pattern. Nature is too complex for that.

With the RR, for example, we often choose a little bit more the soils in the Kirchspiel that have a higher iron content, and we found out over the years that with a slight touch of residual sugar, you nearly don’t realise it. It just brings you a little bit better balance when the wine chooses to stop like this with its natural fermentation. It gets a very good balance and is a fantastic food wine.

And if 90 per cent fits into the VDP pattern, I think it’s perfect. Also, it’s completely okay if you have a wine that is a little bit left or right from the way it is, because nature is so complex, and you can’t make rules for everything and exceptions for everything. Therefore, if we have the feeling a wine gives us a certain direction, finds its own harmony and its own balance when it stops fermentation, we will never try to put it in a certain pattern.

[Felix]: Same way with some of our Nierstein bottlings because sometimes it fits the soil better if you leave a little residual sugar. That’s why in some vintages there’s only Kabinett produced or there’s a Hipping with 10 grams of sugar.

[Klaus-Peter]: For example, now in 2025, Hipping finished by nature at 10.5 grams residual sugar. Now you can warm up the barrel or you can inoculate with yeast to completely finish its fermentation, but we don’t do it. We keep it at 10.5 grams, where nature chose to stop, and it will be a wine that can age for decades, and it will be a brilliant food wine, a wine that wine lovers will love, exactly because we did not force it into something that was not nature’s plan.

[88 Bamboo]: And then there is G-Max – the finest and certainly the most expensive dry Riesling in the world – and the wine John Gilman made the first young dry Riesling ever to receive a perfect score. Yet its beginnings are domestic: a ‘baby wine’ made to mark the birth of your son Maximilian, from the oldest vines of a single parcel you decline to name, its name joining ‘G’ for your great-grandfather Georg to ‘Max’ for Maximilian. You have said its real purpose was never the trophy it became but constant improvement, that ideas are tried on G-Max first and only later rolled out to the other wines. It ferments, alone among your wines, in a 1,000-litre Mosel Fuder, for no technical reason but because the cask was your mother’s, and she came from the Mosel.

Klaus-Peter, you’ve called G-Max your research plot, where an idea is tested before it reaches the rest of the cellar. What are some of these “boundaries of understanding” that you have challenged with the G-Max plot? Could you share with us some of your biggest experiments at the moment, or what ideas or challenges are you thinking about currently?

[Klaus-Peter]: In the end, we are not experimenting a lot, because we trust the soil. It’s old vines, it’s beautiful limestone rock soil, and you don’t have to do a lot of experiments. It’s like a child: you trust in its capacities, and you try to bring the best out of it. So you have the feeling it has great potential, and you don’t want to mess it up.

So it’s more that we know how good the soil is, and know how fantastic the wine can taste from this parcel, and we work with a lot of respect and a lot of gratitude. But you always feel a little bit small in comparison with what nature gives you.

(Source: Weingut Keller)

For example, this morning we were tasting some blackberries at the Rotenberg vineyard. And the blackberries, they had such a fantastic taste, such a great acidity, and it’s so incredible what nature can produce. And that’s a little bit the feeling when we are standing in the G-Max parcel. You get so grateful for what is possible when a fantastic soil, old vines and a passionate grower find each other. That’s our feeling when we work this parcel, and we would also be happy to share where exactly it comes from.

Maximilian Keller, the younger brother of Felix, is the namesake of the estate's famous G-Max. We have had the opportunity to join a fantastic Keller masterclass with Max in Singapore.  

But I really saw how grapes were taken away from the Romanée-Conti plot, or how people threatened famous growers with famous plots with whatever. I think we just could not sleep during harvest.

We experienced already in our own plots that people are walking through them, cutting grapes, tasting grapes, and that’s just difficult when you know you can spread botrytis. It’s normally not about tasting a single grape, but they don’t understand what they are doing, because you have all these natural fungi. You have yeast on the cuticle of the grapes, and you can really spread some things. Therefore, it’s just not the time to walk through vineyards and touch grapes or taste grapes. We realise it more and more in vineyards like Abtserde, Morstein or Hubacker.

So we are really also grateful that we never revealed the secret of where the G-Max plot is.

“…for us it’s important that we have a wine that is in some way affordable and at really high quality… they can be happy drinkers their whole life.”

–Klaus-Peter on the Riesling Von der Fels

[88 Bamboo]: Klaus-Peter, you name every grand cru for its slope, yet G-Max, your pinnacle, keeps its origin secret after grapes were once stolen. What do you make of and feel about the mystery and mythology that has grown around it? Is there a lesson in there somewhere that maybe the wine world loves a good winemaker more than it does a good plot of land?

[Klaus-Peter]: In the end, it’s the wine that fascinates people. That’s always the most important thing. When you have it in the glass and it speaks to you in a way no other wine perhaps has spoken to you before, then you feel a special connection.

And when people taste it and they feel like, oh, that could be a German Montrachet, as Jancis Robinson wrote, then provenance and vineyard name on the label are very important. But there are a few cases where the wine speaks so strongly, and it shows where it comes from. There are also sometimes reasons not to put it on the label.

(Source: Christie's Auction)

[88 Bamboo]: Having traced the family, the vineyards and the cellar with you, we would like to step back and ask what holds it all together. People reach for different things when they describe Weingut Keller: a family that thinks of itself ‘first of all as growers’, with the obsession living in the vineyard and the lightest possible hand in the cellar; ten generations on the same limestone since 1789, marked now by the pale tower your father raised over the Hubacker to say that this ground matters; and the discipline of declassifying even grand-cru fruit rather than letting a great name go out on a wine that is not ready.

If you had to distil it to a single thread, how would you define the essence of Weingut Keller, the thing that runs from the limestone, through the way you farm, to what finally reaches the glass? What is this estate, at its core, really about? What is something important about Weingut Keller that very few people can appreciate looking from the outside?

[Klaus-Peter]: I think a very important thing that people from the outside are not seeing is our lunch table at twelve o’clock – the whole team is together with us every day for lunch. Many are sleeping here. They are living together.

[Felix]: I think it’s most important for us. It’s about the people who farm in the vineyard, who work in the cellar. It’s about our whole team, us being more or less like a family with our guys, because we also enjoy time in the evenings. They’re nearly all living next to the winery or in the winery. We have pizza evenings together. We do some nice tastings. We talk a lot – and not only about wine.

(Source: Weingut Keller)

[Klaus-Peter]: Every day now at 10:30am, we harvest the vegetables in the garden. We have a huge garden, and also love to grow tomatoes and salads.

[Felix]: So aside from wine growing, it’s also about our chickens. It’s about growing our own potatoes. We just planted 20 apple trees to produce apple juice for the team. There’s so much more than only the vineyards.

[Klaus-Peter]: And we all care for each other, and we are all passionate about the topics that really unite us like a family. All these discussions during lunch are something somebody from the outside normally doesn’t get as information.

A lot of aspects are discussed that are not coming from Felix or me, but from passionate young guys who just say, ‘Why are we doing things like this? And why shouldn’t we try? This year offers new challenges. Why don’t we try to do this and that?’ And it will be about shading the canopy more, making arches, or do you want to trim, or just to keep the apex intact. It’s also little details, and we discuss those details during lunch.

(Source: Klaus-Peter Keller)

We have good fresh food, often from the garden. We have a good glass of wine, and then you create an atmosphere to really exchange about your work, about what we are doing at the moment, and I think this creative process during lunch is very important for us.

“Your neighbouring grower is not your competitor, but a friend to share information with and to work together, because there is a saying: ‘alone you go fast, together you go far.’”

–Klaus-Peter on how Rheinhessen rose together

[88 Bamboo]: Today the Rheinhessen region is spoken of as amongst the world’s serious white-wine addresses, and your estate sits at the head of that revival. For much of the last century the region was overlooked, and simply seen as the engine room of mass-produced Liebfraumilch wine. Yet, Klaus-Peter, as you and your father found in the old church records, these same hills had long ago been prized for their wine since the Middle Ages. It is worth remembering, too, that Liebfraumilch itself was once counted among Europe’s finest wines that lost its good name only later, through mass production and blending across regions.

Klaus-Peter, how do you look back on Rheinhessen’s non-linear journey through the centuries, from a series of ups and downs to its standing today? In the wider world’s eyes, what does it mean to you to see the repute of Liebfraumilch change over the years and now finally fading away?

[Klaus-Peter]: I think the question, for example, of Liebfraumilch is more a question that journalists asked my father 25 years ago. No journalist has asked me this question in the last 20 years, because it’s so far back in history.

Liebfraumilch in the 1970s was a phenomenally popular, mass-produced, semi-sweet German white wine.

It’s a little bit like Napa Valley before you had the Judgment of Paris in 1976. Nobody was interested in Napa Valley, and they were also producing grapes with high yields. Who knew Copenhagen as the centre of the food movement or Nordic cuisine before Noma was there?

We now have the climatic conditions that we did not have 50, 60, 70 years ago. And that’s also something we should not forget. We had two bad world wars. We had a population that was starving. They needed to be fed, and for sure then you also know the yields are higher. The quality is lower, but that’s not only one wine like Liebfraumilch or Blue Nun. They made some mistakes at the beginning.

Liebfraumilch originally came from a small vineyard in Worms, 10 hectares owned by P.J. Valckenberg, and this vineyard was so good in quality in the beginning. Everybody was fascinated by it. But then it was too successful. It was a little bit like a three-star Michelin restaurant that was too successful, and it started to make fast food.

And that was the history of Liebfraumilch: that they started to buy wine not only from other growers in the region, but also from the Pfalz, from Rheingau, from Nahe. It’s not only a Rheinhessen story. It was just too successful because it originally was very good, and then they started to make a strong brand, and this strong brand was for the whole region a little bit perhaps like a Beaujolais Nouveau in Beaujolais.

Also in Beaujolais, you have fantastic wines. But with this Beaujolais Nouveau that is already on the market a few weeks after harvest time, it’s not so easy. We had tastings. Maison Leroy also had that in the 1930s. I remember we had a blind tasting of great wines from 1934: Fleurie from Leroy, Musigny, Chambertin, Les Gaudichots (Vosne-Romanée) and other grand crus from the Côte d’Or. And in this blind tasting the 1934 Fleurie from Leroy came in first.

In the end, the potential was there. But you see, you need the right combination of people, of climate, and also of circumstances. After the World Wars you’re lost, and with all the big problems and suffering population, you had other problems than producing great wine, and it really needed another 30, 40 years for everything to recover.

We needed a generation of our grandfathers, of my father, who met my mother from the Mosel who was so extremely passionate about Riesling, and they would have loved to make great dry Riesling in the 1970s, but in this part of Rheinhessen it was too cold. So I was the lucky one who joined the winery, again with a passionate wife, in the 2000s. The window opened and nature welcomed us for our ideas, and we could produce great dry Riesling.

And it’s a little bit the same with Chardonnay. My father already planted Chardonnay in 1989, but it was too early. So for many years, we had to combine Chardonnay with Pinot Blanc, because Pinot Blanc is lower in acidity and it found its balance only with another variety.

(Source: Klaus-Peter Keller)

And then in 2018, Felix joined the estate, and a window opened for Chardonnay. I was still a little bit insecure about it because, for sure, I had the experience and the discussions with my father that Chardonnay alone can be a little bit too cool, perhaps for the climate. We now have here the climate that Burgundy had 40 years ago. And Felix convinced me. He said, ‘We are making high-density plantings. I talked a lot with Olivier Lamy. We can do it. We have low yields. We will reach the maturity. It will be a great wine from the Zellertal soils.’

We had a French collector tasting at the winery two days ago. He tasted a 2023 Rotenberg Chardonnay and said, ‘Oh, this reminds me of the Domaine Ramonet from the early 1980s.’ A French person, and that’s not the only French person: we have had many people from France coming who are showing interest in this slightly cooler, higher acidity style of Chardonnay. Climate change affects all the regions, and you can still make fantastic wine in Burgundy, but it’s a different type of wine than you could do 40 years ago.

[Felix]: I think if you had told me at the start that we would be here after eight years of this project, I would have said, ‘You are crazy.’ And we are very happy with the results that we even get from very young vines.

Also here, for sure, there might be some more difficult vintages at some point, but we can still choose to produce more sparkling than to produce more still wine. We have all the options.

[Klaus-Peter]: That’s also very important, because climate change does not mean it’s getting warmer and warmer. It’s not only one direction. We have the Gulf Stream. And some forecasts say that the influence of the Gulf Stream on Northern Europe could become a little bit weaker in the future. If the influence of the Gulf Stream gets a little bit weaker in the future, we will fight for ripeness.

The Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) play an important role in moderating temperatures in Continental Europe (Source: BBC)

[Felix]: But in terms of vintage, it can be very different. For example, 2021 and 2024 were quite cool and high in acidity. In comparison, a vintage like 2025 is much more charming. And there are weather extremes: it’s not only getting hotter; we’re getting more periods of extreme weather.

[Klaus-Peter]: Also, that you get hail in so many different areas. We just must find a way to be able to produce the best possible quality. But this best possible quality: in some years, it’s a Kabinett for Riesling, for example, in the Schubertslay. Then we will not go for a dry wine; it can be a Kabinett. Or for Chardonnay, perhaps it’s not a still wine, but it is a sparkling wine.

The fantastic thing is that it comes from extraordinary soil, and extraordinary soil will always shine in the wine, and we have more possibilities. That’s the difference to Weingut Keller 30, 40 years ago, or those days when Julia and I started, or my father and my mother did it.

And that’s very important for the future: that you don’t have only one topic. Because if you don’t have the natural conditions for it [during one season], and you know, I don’t want to make dry Riesling when it’s not a year for dry Riesling. I don’t want to make sparkling when it’s not a year for sparkling. I don’t want to make red wine when it’s not a year for red wine. I want to make it when it’s perfect for it, and if not, we don’t make dry. We make Kabinett.

[Felix]: We decide on that for every parcel. Not for the whole thing. So sometimes a bit more exposed parcels can still produce a great red wine in a cool vintage. Sometimes a cooler spot like in the Zellertal can be better fitting to sparkling in a cool vintage, for example.

[Klaus-Peter]: You will never have that one vintage will be completely this or that, but we have a lot of different parcels that give us different opportunities. Sometimes the wine lover will not realise it so much, but that’s the discussions we have during harvest or at our lunch table.

“Liebfraumilch originally came from a small vineyard in Worms, 10 hectares owned by P.J. Valckenberg, and this vineyard was so good in quality in the beginning… But then it was too successful. It was a little bit like a three-star Michelin restaurant that was too successful, and it started to make fast food.”

–Klaus-Peter on how Liebfraumilch lost its name

[88 Bamboo]: Klaus-Peter, you have been clear that Rheinhessen’s rise was no solo achievement: over the last forty years its growers chose to lift one another up rather than compete in isolation, the young ‘Message in a Bottle’ generation among them, showing their wines side by side and trading everything they learned.

What work did it take, for Weingut Keller and your neighbours in the region, to win the modern wine world over? Could you tell us about that spirit of exchange and the friends who came up alongside you, and what it taught you about how a whole region, and not only one estate, earns its reputation?

[Klaus-Peter]: In the end, the most important thing is that you know what quality is. How does a fantastic Riesling taste? How does a very good Pinot Noir taste? How does a great Chardonnay taste?

And in our generation, also the young growers travelled more. They were not focused only on their home area. They were not only focused on Germany, but they made their first experiences in Piedmont. They were in Champagne. They were perhaps in Napa Valley. They were in Australia, and they came home with a lot of new ideas, and they did not only bring those new ideas, but a completely different openness to colleagues as well.

Your neighbouring grower is not your competitor, but a friend to share information with and to work together, because there is a saying: ‘alone you go fast, together you go far.’ And I think this was the very important step that Rheinhessen took 25, 30 years ago: that we understood we are all sitting in the same boat, and if we are going the same direction, we will be much faster and much better. And that more people would realise the potential of the region, I think that was the main reason.

And for sure, we had not only one, but we had two handfuls of talented growers who got along with each other very well. We did tastings together. First, local parties in Mainz together, and in the beginning, only a few people came. But after a few years, 800, 1,000, 1,200 people came, and we really had to say, ‘Oh, wow! It can’t be more.’

We did not have the money to sleep in big hotels. We came with our vineyard cars, and we had makeshift beds, and we slept in our cars after those parties. And in the morning, we met in small cafés and had a coffee together, and couldn’t believe what happened the night before.

That was Rheinhessen 30, 40 years ago, in the beginning. But it was a little bit like a start-up energy. You felt the potential. You felt it’s the right thing to do. It was a good way, and you had talented people around you who had the same ideas, similar ideas.

In the end, it’s not a surprise that a guy like David Schildknecht now in Vinous wrote that at the moment he cannot imagine that any other Riesling-growing area in the world can surpass Rheinhessen, because he feels this energy and this standing together and working together.

Klaus-Peter and Julia attending the Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee celebrations at Buckingham Palace – their Niersteiner Hipping Riesling was famously poured at the celebrations. (Source: Klaus-Peter Keller)

[88 Bamboo]: Climate change has been one of the most cited anxieties of wine makers today. Yet you have called your corner of Rheinhessen ‘a beneficiary of climate change’: the inland limestone that once struggled to ripen Riesling fully now does so almost every year, which makes the estate’s profound dry Riesling possible. One of the most fascinating proof of the benefits of warming may be the vineyard you helped plant near Kristiansand in Norway, at fifty-eight degrees north.

Klaus-Peter, you have called that Norwegian result ‘beautiful and frightening’: could you elaborate for our benefit, where does the gift shade into a worry, whether for your own limestone or for Riesling more widely?

[Klaus-Peter]: The quote was actually first said by our apprentice Anne Enggrav. She came from Norway, and because she loved Riesling so much, we planted it at her parents’ house, in their garden. We planted the Riesling, and after 10 years, we had the first ripe grapes in 2018. It was around 75° Oechsle (Editor's Note: "Oechsle" measures ripeness by the density of the freshly pressed grape juice).

[Felix]: It was like a cool vintage Kabinett from the 1970s or 1980s.

[Klaus-Peter]: So it was just so that we could say we made a wine from it successfully. And in the last ten years it was not possible at all to harvest mature grapes in Kristiansand. In the end, our Geisenheim professor Hans Reiner Schultz said from 2050 onwards you can perhaps harvest ripe Riesling grapes more often. I think this is a good window.

We feel grateful that we could make it one time with ripe or mature grapes. You always think next year they will be ripe again, or two years or three years later. But when you have nearly ten years in a row where it was not possible to get ripe grapes, everything gets a little bit more balanced again. It’s not a feeling of fear. It’s more like it’s a joy when it’s possible. And when it’s not possible, we make a verjus, like a salad dressing for restaurants in the region who appreciate having a dressing made from grape juice.

At the moment, I really see more the opportunity than the problem, because you can make a lot in the vineyard as well. We are preparing the vineyards already at the moment. For example, by high-density planting, which gives you deeper roots, which gives you more shadow, which gives you less evaporation of the soil and more nutrients.

[Felix]: Also more water being accessible to the vines through deeper roots. For example, also less and smaller clusters per vine, which leads to less stress per vine, more intense flavours, thicker skin. Higher acidity. And maybe also the potential of getting vines to an older age without suffering. There are many benefits.

[Klaus-Peter]: For me, the important thing is that we try to adapt. And that’s in the history of mankind: Darwin wrote about the survival of the fittest.

The same will happen in Burgundy. They have an AOC which at the moment says that the vine has to be close to the ground, because those rules come from a hundred years ago, when in Burgundy they had to fight for maturity. A hundred years later, it’s less a fight for maturity. It’s more a fight against too fast maturity.

Therefore, it could make sense, and some growers already are doing it, to have more space from the soil, so you don’t get the heat from the soil, but you have more wind. You also have less fungal diseases or frost risk, for example. If you are a little bit further away from the ground, you always see the burning lights in the vineyards, with not 20 centimetres, not 15 centimetres, but 50, 60 centimetres from the ground. You also have less frost risk because 50 centimetres from the ground it’s a little bit warmer than directly 10 centimetres over the ground.

In the end, you can also adapt really in the vineyard, and that’s a thing that has to be done.

And also a young generation in Burgundy like Charles Lachaux (Domaine Arnoux-Lachaux), or since many years, Lalou Bize-Leroy (of Domaine Leroy) – she’s not young, but she’s young in her spirit – with her untrellised vineyards and échalas vineyards, or young growers like also now Pierre Duroché (Domaine Duroché) or for sure Olivier Lamy (Domaine Hubert Lamy) with his high-density vineyards and Thomas Bouley (Domaine Jean-Marc & Thomas Bouley), Bruno Lorenzon (Domaine Lorenzon) and for sure William Kelley: they all have ideas to adapt in the vineyard, and that’s something that we will have to do.

And then you can even in warmer vintages produce a wine that does not taste warmer than it did 20 years ago. But you must be curious. You must exchange with colleagues, talk a lot, look what happens, and then also be open for new things.

And also high-density planting is not really new. If you look 200 years ago, prior to phylloxera, a normal vineyard in Europe was about 30,000 to 35,000; in Champagne sometimes 60,000 vines per hectare. So it’s nothing new that we are introducing.

We always think it’s new because our time on Earth is limited. If you see the whole curve, we are only a little dot. Yet we hope in our 80- or 90-year lifespans we could influence what happens in world history. In the end, we should not consider ourselves too important. We have to try to make the best out of the conditions that we have and try to have an impact on something that lasts.

But it’s so hard to foresee and to forecast whether it will be in this direction the next 50 or 100 years, or, as I told before, if, for example, the influence of the Gulf Stream will be a little bit weaker, because it’s such a complex system, and then we have completely different conditions and perhaps have to go closer to the ground to take all the warmth we need. Perhaps completely different vineyards will be the top spots that we did not think of 20, 30 years ago.

So it’s really very complex, and I think at the moment we can really adapt very well by just making very good and precise and individual vineyard work.

Apart from the challenges of climate change, we really have to say that for wine lovers, there has never been a better time to drink German wine. Forty, fifty years ago, we had to fight for ripeness. Riesling was often a little bit green and a little bit sour, and now you get fully ripe grapes and the quality we never had before.

“…climate change does not mean it’s getting warmer and warmer. It’s not only one direction. We have the Gulf Stream… If the influence of the Gulf Stream gets a little bit weaker in the future, we will fight for ripeness.”

–Klaus-Peter on the risk nobody talks about

[88 Bamboo]: Felix, you will farm the estate in a warmer climate than any winemaker in your family has known. How does that shape the way you think about its future in the vineyard? Does the warming open up more ground for you that earlier generations could not reliably have ripened?

[Felix]: Definitely. So I think when I came back after my apprenticeship, at the end of 2017, I started looking for new plots for my sparklings. And I wanted it to be something which is cooler than the plots we already had, because I thought it’s maybe a chance to adapt something new.

We also didn’t have any possibilities to take grapes from any of the Pinot plots or from any of the Riesling plots. It’s not possible to take off grapes in a regular way for the sparkling production. So that’s when we rediscovered the Zellertal, because there used to be a really great production in the past, also mentioned in the early 20th century. The monks discovered it even earlier.

I would say 15 years ago, it would have been hard growing great reds or even Riesling there, and it really came up in the 2010s. I think a first big step was maybe the 2015 vintage. And at first we didn’t plan to produce a still wine there. We tried it with the sparkling, and then we got curious because we saw the potential, and that’s how all the Chardonnay and Pinot projects in the Zellertal started. We also added a little Riesling now. It will be coming over the next few years.

[Klaus-Peter]: Sometimes when you choose a way, you don’t know exactly where it will lead to. So the Zellertal, we thought, would be a fantastic place for Felix to make sparkling, because he loved the topic so much.

I directly said yes, for sure you can make sparkling, but please make the best possible sparkling, because with Weingut Keller you can make everything as long as it is of exceptional quality. That’s the idea, and we found those fantastic soils in the Zellertal and realised: the Zellertal is low pH, high acidity, it’s slow ripening, so perfect conditions for it.

[Felix]: So the difference can sometimes be really big. For example, in the first vintage of Pinot Noir in the Zellertal, we picked nearly two weeks later compared to some of our Westhofen Pinot Noir plots. And with much higher acidity, it’s just a great prospect for the future.

German Spätburgunder grapes - genetically the same variety as Pinot Noir found in France.  

[Klaus-Peter]: It sometimes is an advantage, sometimes it’s a disadvantage, but it gives you more possibilities, and that’s the most important thing. And what is brilliant and what stays constant is the soil. You have a fantastic soil, and that is always the base.

And then the rest we can’t influence, because nature always shows us what is possible and where the limitations are. Yes, for sure we have ideas, we would love to do this and that, but nature tells us what is possible. With the Zellertal, we have more opportunities.

“…Kupferberg even was poured at the World Exhibition in 1900 together with a Moët champagne. So German Sekt was seen on the same level even by the French as their own product.”

–Klaus-Peter on German Sekt’s lost golden age

[88 Bamboo]: If Riesling is the estate’s mother tongue, Sekt is its newest voice. Felix, you have described falling in love with Sekt in training, first under Mathieu Kauffmann at Reichsrat von Buhl and then with the Bérèche brothers in Champagne, and you have made sparkling wine at Dalsheim since 2018, starting with two hundred bottles. Made by the traditional bottle-fermented method, mostly from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, the programme is scaling towards a planned seven to ten thousand bottles a year as the young Zellertal parcels mature, and Anne Krebiehl MW has given it a named place in her Vinous Sekt report. The estate has also recently released its first single-vineyard Sekt, a 2021 that rested around five years on the lees in a run of roughly nine hundred bottles.

Felix, what did your time under him at von Buhl and with the Bérèche brothers teach you about sparkling wine? And what did you most want to carry home?

[Felix]: In the end, it’s a long-term project. We have produced sparkling now for eight years. And you don’t really get to try a lot, so it takes a lot of time, and you need to be very accurate from the very beginning, because it also takes you a lot of time to change directions if you aren’t happy with the result.

So you have to be very patient. You have to really focus on taking the right decisions from the very beginning. It’s like you can’t change directions after one or two years, and that’s what’s very fascinating in sparkling.

It’s also another possibility, because if you build up a stock in sparkling, you can really rely on that, even if you have a bad vintage through frost or hail damage, and there are only small quantities. You can rely on the fact that there’s always something in the cellar to be able to sell. My main focus is on the Burgundy varieties for sparkling. So that’s what we mainly use. In some exceptional vintages, there’s also Riesling sparkling.

[Klaus-Peter]: And I think we can give one secret today, that we tried to make a Schubertslay sparkling. We loved the idea. In France, you have a Bollinger, ‘Vieilles Vignes Françaises’, ‘from own-rooted vines’, and to make an own-rooted wine from Riesling and from a great Mosel site, that was really a thing we wanted to try. And Felix made it possible in 2021, and we are already eagerly waiting to see what the Schubertslay own-rooted could taste like exactly.

[88 Bamboo]: Felix, congratulations on the first single-vineyard Sekt which is a landmark for the house. Why was 2021 the vintage for it (Riesling), and what does one great site give a sparkling wine that a cuvée drawn across parcels cannot?

[Felix]: We actually do have single-vineyard sparklings that are yet to be disgorged and released from older vintages. We started with that in 2019, but with Pinot, and in 2020 for Chardonnay. They need more time on the lees, so we will keep them at least for four or five more years.

Felix Keller giving his sparkling rosé a taste test (Source: Felix Keller)

But I think these sparkling wines are already more accessible, and that’s why we chose the 2021 vintage, because it brings a lot of energy, a lot of complexity. We had perfect grapes, a low pH, and I think it’s very interesting to see where the sparklings are going for the future. But as I said, Riesling will only be produced in cool vintages, because we think it fits a dry style of wine better in a warm vintage than sparkling.

[88 Bamboo]: Klaus-Peter, you've told the story of German Sekt's lost golden age – how it once rivalled Champagne before its prestige sank with the Titanic. You have said the family were ‘all convinced of this new project, but the expertise and feel for Sekt is with Felix’.

Is starting Felix's Sekt programme partly about reclaiming something Germany lost, rather than simply adding a new category to the estate? And what do you see in Felix’s work with Sekt that tells you its future is being handled in the right way?

[Klaus-Peter]: I think it was already a tradition in the region to produce a great Sekt, and in former times it was also allowed to call it Rhine champagne. So the name champagne for German Sekt was normal till after the First World War. In 1919, it was not allowed anymore to call German sparklings champagne.

The decline of premium German sparklers in the early 20th century coincided with the sinking of the Titanic. Prior to World War I, Germany’s sparkling wines were incredibly famous and often commanded higher prices than Champagne, before the industry was devastated by the world wars.

Only about 30 kilometres from us in Mainz, we had Kupferberg. Kupferberg produced one of the greatest German sparkling wines. And today you can visit the winery with its deep, deep, deep cellars and seven, yes, seven levels on top of each other.

And Kupferberg even was poured at the World Exhibition in 1900 together with a Moët champagne. So German Sekt was seen on the same level even by the French as their own product. Imagine they poured Kupferberg Sekt on the World Exhibition’s first day. And Kupferberg still has a pavilion in their winery that they took to the World Exhibition. So 125 years ago, it was very normal in a restaurant to check: oh, am I drinking a German sparkling, or am I choosing a Pommery or Moët or Krug?

But you know, the idea of high-quality sparkling was a little bit neglected, because we lost the name champagne after World War One, and then the production after World War Two went into the direction of mass production, high yield, sweetness, which was understandable but not good for the reputation of the product.

I’m always a big, big fan if I have the feeling something has potential and we don’t get the full potential out of it at the moment. And we had one pioneer in our region - Volker Raumland. He’s only 300 metres from us, and he started already in the early 1990s to produce excellent Sekt here.

[Felix]: He already back then planted Chardonnay for sparkling. He is really the guy that saw the potential.

[Klaus-Peter]: And he put the idea forward. So we had Volker Raumland, and then you also have to see, Mathieu Kauffmann was cellar master at Bollinger, and he chose to come to Germany because he saw the potential in German Sekt. And he saw the challenge. With Volker Raumland and Mathieu Kauffmann already on the bandwagon, we now in the meantime also have Sekthaus Griesel.

[Felix]: We see a lot of new small producers, and it’s getting more and more common. Many of the good producers are also producing sparkling wine.

[Klaus-Peter]: Now it’s a little bit easier to remember the good, positive old times for German Sekt, when already 10, 15, 20, 30 estates are making it at a very high level.

But I think at the very beginning it was very important, besides the good history that we had, pioneers like Volker Raumland here in our region. And then the sign from the outside that accelerated everything was really when Mathieu Kauffmann came, because when a highly acclaimed cellar master from Champagne came to Germany to make sparkling because he believed in the concept, and then really by chance that Felix, exactly at this time, met Mathieu Kauffmann at Reichsrat von Buhl, that was just a fantastic combination for the whole thing.

“…please make the best possible sparkling, because with Weingut Keller you can make everything as long as it is of exceptional quality.”

–Klaus-Peter's exhortation to Felix when he first began work on the estate's sparkling wines

[88 Bamboo]: Chardonnay is the other frontier you have made your own. Critics have placed you among a handful of ‘star growers’ leading a German Chardonnay revival, and your Talfels bottling has drawn Burgundian comparisons: grown on the limestone of the Zellertal from young high-density vines alongside an older parcel in the Frauenberg, then raised around twelve months in barrique with a small share of new oak. Felix’s grandfather trialled Chardonnay here in the 1980s, but in those years it ‘didn’t ripen every year’. Your own case for it is a matter of climate: that the Rheinhessen of today feels like ‘the Burgundy of the early nineties’.

Where would you like the estate’s Chardonnay to stand in ten years, and what has to go right in the young high-density Zellertal vines for it to get there?

[Felix]: I think for us the main focus is improving every year, quality-wise, and it’s a process that will take time. I’m already incredibly happy with what we produced the last few years, but you still have to also adapt to the variety’s needs, because it’s different than producing Riesling, for example. We are not used to it because we don’t have 50 years of history. So I’m sure there will be vintages which are more challenging. But till now, I’m very happy with what’s coming in the bottle.

And we also have taken big steps, because we get the best oak, for example, for the Chardonnays. We really improved in that over the last years, because we get in touch with very small coopers, who sometimes only produce less than 500 barrels a year, who only distribute to very small family-driven wineries, and discuss how to improve. It’s a big process for us. It takes a lot of small steps.

[Klaus-Peter]: And in the end, we were a little bit surprised when Olivier Lamy visited and told us that with high density, he has the feeling that after seven or eight years, the high density tastes better than a normal plantation with 60, 70 years of age. We were surprised to hear this, but now can already feel and taste this in our barrels and in the bottle. We are really surprised how high density really pushes the quality because you have, per vine, a much lower yield.

I was also discussing this one day with Aubert de Villaine. He told me that in the days when Burgundy had high density, the yield per vine was sometimes only 30 to 70 millilitres (from 1820s–1860s). So perhaps one tenth or one fifteenth of what it is today. That’s the biggest difference: even if the vines are young, you get much more nutrients through the root system. You have much more fine roots, and you have much smaller yield. You have thicker skins. You have very concentrated juice.

So it’s for us a little bit these high-density plantations: it’s nearly more like gardening. You don’t have machines to go through the vines. Everything is complete handwork. It’s very time intense. It’s very cost intense. And also some neighbours are shaking their heads and asking themselves, and us as well, ‘What are you doing here at the moment?’

Also at wine schools or at universities, some are saying this can’t be the future of German wine growing, because in the last 250 years, all the development was less time in the vineyard, so that you have more time for cellar or marketing. And we really want to turn the time back to those days before phylloxera when you had the 35,000 vines per hectare, when you had the many hours in the vineyard.

Many people are a little bit afraid to put so many hours in the vineyard nowadays, because it’s very cost intense. But I think the future of wine will be that we try to be as good as possible to produce wine as soil-driven, as vintage-driven as possible, and then there will always be a market for those wines.

“…the hardest judge is my father, or Felix’s Opa, when he goes with us in the cellar tasting barrel by barrel. We never fear a journalist, but the judgment of my father is very direct and very precise.”

–Klaus-Peter on who he is really making the wine for

[88 Bamboo]: Red wine is another one of the estate’s bold claims on the future. Germany is now the third-largest grower of Pinot Noir in the world, and the family pursues Spätburgunder under an idea it sums up as ‘red Riesling’: Pinot chased for freshness and minerality rather than weight. The range runs across several voices, from the estate Réserve through the Bürgel and Frauenberg crus to the Felix Spätburgunder from the Morstein, and now to the young high-density Zellerweg am Schwarzen Herrgott, which produces the highly rated Spätburgunder GG.

The Spätburgunder carries forward the ‘red Riesling’ idea of Pinot sought for freshness over weight. How far do you believe German Pinot can go, and what does that pursuit of lift and minerality ask of you in the vineyard and the cellar?

[Felix]: I think freshness is always very important, because you should be able to enjoy a bottle, not only a glass of wine. And I have the feeling that for many red wines, it can be the case nowadays that they get too powerful to really enjoy a whole bottle. So sometimes, personally, I’m disappointed by some wines.

But in the end, for us, it’s more like we are around the point where Burgundy was in the late 1980s, beginning 1990s, where you really have the feeling in a very consistent way they could produce high quality. So also many vintages in the 1990s in Burgundy were a bit lighter in colour, a bit more acid-driven, but they developed beautifully with age.

And I think for sure climate helps us. So in very warm vintages, we have a bit more full-bodied style than in cooler vintages. But all in all, it’s a perfect adaptation, and we still profit a lot from climate change in that way. But what will be in 40 or 50 years? You never know.

[Klaus-Peter]: Perhaps in 40, 50 years, it could be that the Pinots will be a little bit more powerful. But in the end, you have for every style its market. We are not producing Shiraz from Australia or Napa Valley Cabernet. Our topic is delicacy, precision, elegance.

And if you want a white wine and if you drink Riesling, you have decided for perhaps the finest variety we grow on this planet. You know exactly what to expect. And when you choose a German Pinot or German Chardonnay, you also choose to go into the finesse and elegance direction. And if this is not your direction, that’s also completely okay.

Some like sushi, the purest expression of fish, perhaps, and some want it cooked or steamed or grilled. And also, it can make you very, very happy. I don’t want to say everybody must like what we do, but for those who like the precision, elegance and craftsmanship, for those, it will be a thrilling journey for the next 10, 20, 30 years.

And also, again, here, what is really interesting. Before going to the Zellertal, we did research, and the first German wine magazine was founded in the late 1890s by a Jewish wine merchant in Berlin. It was called Der Weinkenner, and in one of his first issues, I think, early 1904, 1905, he wrote already about Assmannshausen, Ingelheim, and the Zellertal as the three best spots for red wine in Germany.

And also German Pinot, especially the Pinot from Assmannshausen and Ingelheim, had a great reputation. And if you have the possibility to taste some mature bottles from Kloster Eberbach, from the Schatzkammer of Kloster Eberbach: their Pinots from the 1920s, from 1950 and 1924, which I tasted recently, are so incredibly fresh that a blind tasting with some old Romanée-Conti would really be interesting.

It’s more again like a forgotten story. We don’t know it anymore. But when you go 150, 120 years back, people would have said yes, for sure, an Assmannshausen Spätburgunder is something very, very special, and perhaps the same level as a Romanée-Saint-Vivant. But we have only forgotten about those. It’s the same with sparkling.

[88 Bamboo]: The reds now reach from the estate Réserve to the new high-density Zellerweg am Schwarzen Herrgott.

How do you think of these wines as a family of different voices?

[Felix]: The part of Zellertal where all the Burgundy varieties are planted is part of Wonnegau as well. Zellertal is divided into the Pfalz part, which belongs to the Mittelhaardt, and the Rheinhessen part, which belongs to Wonnegau.

But I think the biggest difference is in terms of ripening, and in some parts also even more capacity to keep water, and also underground water sources, which can really help in very dry conditions. In the end, we have slightly higher acidity in some years. We have a later ripening, which can even be seven to ten days later compared to other sites. We can really be very happy about that.

(Source: Weingut Keller)

[88 Bamboo]: Klaus-Peter, you brought the Pinot question home from Burgundy, where you trained at Armand Rousseau, with the Ligniers and other great estates.

When you taste the reds made in the estate today, what tells you the estate’s red ambition is in good hands, and where do you still hope it can go?

[Klaus-Peter]: In the end, every development needs time. What I realise at the moment is that in the beginning, also when I started, everybody tried to compare the wines we are making to Burgundy. ‘Your Bürgel tastes a little bit like a Chambolle. Your Morstein tastes a little bit like a Gevrey,’ because it tasted a little bit more deep and serious, perhaps not so tänzerisch (light-footed/graceful). And the Bürgel, which is tänzerisch, reminded people of Chambolle.

But we had our grand crus and people were talking about French grand crus, and there is really a development. The last five or six vintages, people are talking more about it: ‘Your Morstein 2020 reminds a little bit of Morstein 2016, or your Schwarzer Herrgott 2022.’ What we really feel is that people just realise that the quality is something that really sticks to this special part of soil, to this vineyard, and you can compare it to Burgundy, but you don’t have to describe it with Burgundy.

[Felix]: But it’s a fact that more and more growers trust the soils to be fitting for Pinot Noir and also for Chardonnay. It’s not only one or two producers producing these varieties in a cru. It’s getting more and more, and that’s also very positive.

[Klaus-Peter]: Because also in Felix’s generation, and for sure also with the help of climate change, it’s many young growers who, besides Riesling, also plant Pinot and Chardonnay. So it’s a much bigger movement than it was.

When my father, in 1988, 1989, planted his first Chardonnay, he was nearly alone. And then it was a little bit in Baden: Bernhard Huber, Heger, Salwey were early. It was a few names in the whole of Germany. And now Felix has five or ten friends only within the next 15 kilometres to exchange about this topic. And that’s also very important. And I think that will push quality in the next years in a very good direction.

“…the Hubacker vineyard has belonged to the family for nearly 240 years now. We bought it directly after my family came from Switzerland to Germany, and to me that’s something really special because it has never been divided.”

–Felix on what he feels responsible for

[88 Bamboo]: One line recurs when we read about your family. The VDP profile records your own credo, ‘we are happy, but never satisfied’, and the estate seems to live by it, each acclaimed vintage only appears to sharpen the appetite for the next. For a house already spoken of among the world’s greatest, it is a striking refusal to arrive. The wines are celebrated, the cases sell before bottling and the auction records keep climbing, yet the family motto stays ‘never satisfied’.

What does that restlessness actually ask of you in a year when the wines are already acclaimed, and where is it pointing you next?

[Klaus-Peter]: In the end, the best motivation is always when you want to drink it yourself. So for us, the hardest judge is my father, or Felix’s Opa, when he goes with us in the cellar tasting barrel by barrel. We never fear a journalist, but the judgment of my father is very direct and very precise.

And our wives, I think, they are not easy either. They tell us exactly what we did right and what we did wrong. So we have strong judges around us in the family, but we also judge ourselves quite strictly. Because you know, in the end, when it’s not only your profession but also your hobby, you always try to improve, and you look for ways to find even the tiniest details.

All barrels in the cellar are lifted. Then we only move them by gravity. Then we let them settle again. Then we lift them again and we bottle by gravity. It’s many things that take time. But a little bit slower is often much better, because you have the full aromatics. You have the great texture of the wine.

We learnt that if you find the right moment in the vineyard to pick, that’s the most important thing, and then you have 100 per cent. And if we manage to get 99 per cent of this original potential into the bottle, we did a really good job. So we don’t try to lose from the original potential. And one day if we manage 99.1 per cent, we are fantastic. If we manage to make 99.2 per cent in some, it’s great, and it’s our motivation to find the remaining 0.9 per cent. Sometimes it’s only a feeling that makes you feel better about something, because we are not fanatic about analytical things.

Some of our apprentices are shocked when they say, ‘What is the pH of this must, or how do we press here?’ And Felix says, or I say, ‘Hey, I tasted the grape, and I feel safe. I don’t need a pH, I don’t need sugar like this. I only have to taste the grape and I know what to do and what not to do.’

That’s a mixture of really feeling and experience, and also about growing up in a winery that is a family winery for many generations, because I can ask my father about his feelings, about his ideas. Or we taste together, and when three generations taste together with my father, we have more than 60 vintages. With me, we have more than 40 vintages. And Felix also knows 20 vintages. But it’s always so nice to have somebody in the family with this big background of experience.

[88 Bamboo]: Speaking of Klaus Sr., how is he involved in the estate today, and what are his responsibilities?

[Klaus-Peter]: At the age of 77 you don’t have responsibilities anymore. He decides for himself what to do. *Laughs*. But he knows when to do it. He is out every morning at the moment. When it was so hot in the heat waves the last weeks, he was out in the vineyard at five o’clock in the morning. And normally he works from 7:30 till 11. Then he has a light lunch and takes a short nap, and then he’s out in the vineyard three, four hours in the afternoon.

Klaus Keller Senior is in his late 70s today but remains actively involved in assessing their wines and tending to the vines. (Source: Klaus-Peter Keller) 

He always said, ‘I don’t need a golf course. I only need the Hubacker vineyard,’ because he wants to see what he did. And he always says that a beautiful thing about working a vineyard is that you directly see your work. You see, the shoots are now standing straight, or the grapes are hanging exactly as I want, and the leaves face the sun exactly as I want.

And he says that his dream is one day, at work in the Hubacker, just to fall, and that’s it. That’s what would be the nicest death he could imagine for himself as a winemaker.

[88 Bamboo]: Felix, as the tenth generation, and the one who carries it on, is there a part of the essence of Keller you feel most responsible for keeping intact as it passes to you?

[Felix]: In the end, there are many generations that built something exceptional. And for example, the Hubacker vineyard has belonged to the family for nearly 240 years now. We bought it directly after my family came from Switzerland to Germany, and to me that’s something really special because it has never been divided through all this time and has belonged to the family since then as a main plot. I think preserving that is really important to me.

[88 Bamboo]: We would like to close the estate’s story where it is best told, in the glass. In two centuries the family has moved from Liebfraumilch country to the first perfect score ever awarded a young dry Riesling, and the range now reads like chapters: the everyday Von der Fels, the grand crus of Hubacker, Morstein, Kirchspiel and Abtserde, the near-mythical G-Max, and the newer voices in Sekt, Chardonnay and Spätburgunder.

If you had to choose five bottles that tell the story of Weingut Keller, which would they be, and what does each one say? 

[Klaus-Peter]: We already discussed this question before, and we decided to choose first the Keller 1949 Gewürztraminer-Riesling Dalsheim Hubacker. That’s the birth vintage of my father Klaus, a great year, and it also shows exactly how climatic conditions were those days.

Because we were talking about it before, they used Traminer to lower the acidity and to bring some flavour to the wine, and combined it with the minerality and the precision of the Riesling, with probably very high acidity. And even in an exceptional year like 1949, they did the combination of both varieties, which in those days was very normal. You had it in nearly every village, also in many famous vineyards. In those days it was really normal and necessary, because it tasted better.

[Felix]: The second one is the Keller 1989 Hubacker TBA Riesling, the first TBA ever bottled in the winery from Riesling.

[Klaus-Peter]: It was made by my mother Hedwig, who came from the Mosel, from the little village Nittel in the Upper Mosel. And when she started selecting the botrytis berries, an old man from the village went along and he said, ‘Young girl, you are alone here trying to make botrytis selection,’ and my mother was really thrilled and said, ‘Yes, I’m trying to make a TBA of the Hubacker.’

And he shook his head and said, ‘Oh, this will not be possible. Look, your one bucket is not even full. You will not manage this.’ And that challenge became motivation for my mother, and days later she had 52 litres of Trockenbeerenauslese selected. And this already showed, in the early days, what we have today.

(Source: jahrhundertweine.de)

When we hear your questions, it was sometimes nearly embarrassing for us, because we are considered one of Germany’s best estates and the star winemakers, but you always have the generations before you. They play a very important part. If in 1789 Johann Leonhard Keller had not come to Dalsheim and found the Hubacker that he got from the church, our history would be completely different.

And that’s the fantastic thing about family wineries. The challenge is that you must get along very well with each other, because with those three generations under one roof, there is also a potential for conflicts. But when a family really works together, lives together, eats together, has the same passion, then it’s an unbeatable combination and a treasure of experience and exchange that is beautiful. So therefore, the second wine is a 1989 Hubacker, the first TBA made by my mother.

[Felix]: The third wine will be the first vintage of the G-Max: G-Max 2001. I think it was never planned to sell it commercially, but that’s what makes it so special. Because we thought of it more as a wine for the family and not to be sold.

(Source: Simion Marian)

[Klaus-Peter]: But for sure we were proud, and we showed the wine to fans and some wine lovers, and they were so fascinated by it that they said, ‘Oh, how can we get it?’

I think the thing that makes G-Max unique is that it was never planned to become a really famous wine. It was really planned as a wine for the family, and there are many wines that came after G-Max in Germany that were more or less created to be famous. But the roots of G-Max: we found a parcel that delivered extraordinary quality. We realised it, and then we started to bottle it.

Next wine is a Keller 2010 Abts E Grosses Gewächs. 2010 actually was not a very easy year. But if you did good selections, if you did very good work in the vineyard, you managed to integrate the high acidity, and years later, it developed into a really beautiful Grosses Gewächs and became the favourite wine of our Opa, Klaus.

We have a dark corner in our cellar where we have our Schatzkammer, our treasure room, and we didn’t look into the space where the 2010 was, because we thought this wine has many years, we don’t have to look every year. But after 10, 12 years, in 2020, 2021, we came, in COVID times, to this part of the cellar. And there was no Abts E 2010 anymore; it was completely gone. We thought, was there a burglar?

And we asked my father, and he said, ‘I was so fascinated by this wine that I had to drink it.’ So he finished the 2010 Abts E by himself. Therefore, it’s a very special wine *laughs*. We had to re-buy bottles from reliable sources, and we will never forget the moment when we saw the empty space in the cellar and asked, and he said it was so delicious, he emptied it.

And then as final wines we would choose the first vintage of Keller Rotenberg (Chardonnay) and the first vintage of Keller Zellerweg am Schwarzen Herrgott (Pinot Noir), that show how fantastic high-density Pinot Noir and Chardonnay can taste even if the vines are very young, and what a fantastic promise for a great future it is to have those vineyards in the Zellertal.

“…he says that his dream is one day, at work in the Hubacker, just to fall, and that’s it. That’s what would be the nicest death he could imagine for himself as a winemaker.”

–Klaus-Peter on his father, Klaus senior

[88 Bamboo]: This is a family that has always learned across generations and borders: Klaus-Peter at his father’s side on the four-in-the-morning sales drives and later in the cellars of Burgundy, Felix falling in love with Sekt under Mathieu Kauffmann and the Bérèche brothers in Champagne.

Klaus-Peter, what is the best piece of advice you have ever received that still guides your hand today? And what would you most want to tell a young grower setting out in your part of the world?

[Klaus-Peter]: I would say I was once working with a Burgundian grower in the vineyards, and he said, ‘Always trust your feelings.’ It’s much more important than trying to understand or knowing analytical data of grapes or wine. Just trust the soil. Trust good work in the vineyard. Trust your palate. Taste the grapes. Be courageous and sometimes also a bit crazy – never stop trying to improve!

You don’t need a lot of technique and a lot of laboratory advice to make great wine. Trust your own capacity and capability to make a great product. Many wineries are now starting to take consultants from outside. I would really say try to build up a good palate yourself. Try to be connected closely to your vineyard, and your wine will have something special that wine lovers will feel when drinking them.

It’s much more important than travelling around the globe the whole year: being in the vineyard, being close to your wines, and making a really special quality, and not being satisfied easily, but really trying to improve from year to year. That also would be my advice for the next generations. Go out, look in different regions, find wine styles that really touch your soul, that you want to have at your home winery, and be open, support other growers, work together with them, exchange with them, be open.

[88 Bamboo]: Felix, you have had very strong teachers of your own, in Dalsheim and in Champagne. What is the single best piece of advice a mentor has given you, and how does it show up in your work?

[Felix]: I think this advice was to always rely on what I learned, to always question myself in every step, especially after harvest, and also try to keep updated. How is it best possible to adapt to climate change in future?

I think it’s also important to speak to as many other good growers as possible, to talk to friends about the winemaking process, and to discuss your own produced wines as much as possible.

(Source: Klaus-Peter Keller)

[Klaus-Peter]: In the end, to stay connected after harvest, we go with the whole family, with Bella and Felix. We go to Piedmont. We visit Fabio at G.B. Burlotto, and Roagna Estate. Then we are in Burgundy and visit Freddy Mugnier (Domaine Mugnier) or William Kelley (wine writer-turned-winemaker). That’s just where you get the inspiration.

[Felix]: You need an outside view to see what might be a nice idea to adapt or to try out.

[Klaus-Peter]: Or not to try out, and then it’s fantastic when you also have a good network not only within your region but also to other countries and other regions outside your country. That’s also fantastic and very important for the future.

[88 Bamboo]: It's been a hugely insightful and humbling experience speaking with the people behind one of Germany's most legendary estates! Thank you so much for your time!

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@CharsiuCharlie