Taste Testing The Legendary Weingut Keller's Rieslings, Chardonnay & 'Red Rieslings': Von Der Fels, Limestone, RR, Oberer Hubacker GG, Abts E, Chardonnay, Spätburgunder Réserve, Frauenberg Spätburgunder GG

 

There is a tower of pale limestone standing in a vineyard about a kilometre north of Dalsheim, in the flat farm country of southern Rheinhessen. It is roughly six metres tall, put up in the year 2000 from the same stone that lies under the vines, and it marks a four-hectare slope called the Oberer Hubacker that one family has held since 1789. You build something like that when you want to tell people a piece of ground really matters.

Weingut Keller, of Flörsheim-Dalsheim, makes what modern critics call the finest, and certainly the most expensive, dry Riesling in the world. Jancis Robinson reached for the grandest comparison in white wine when she called the Keller Rieslings the “German Montrachets”, after the most revered dry white of Burgundy. But there is a gap between what the wine is and where it comes from – and that is the whole of the Weingut Keller story. Notable New York importer Stephen Bitterolf admiringly described the Rheinhessen “as one of the most maligned German winemaking regions”. For most of the last century, German wine had largely overlooked this region, and it was not where the wine world came looking for its benchmarks. It was really the work of the Kellers that took this estate to international renown.

 

 

I recently tasted through the current range at a Weingut Keller masterclass held at Praelum Wine Bistro in Singapore, with the wines brought in by Malaysia and Singapore importer Daritana Wines. 

The class led by Maximilian Keller or Max, the elder of the Keller sons. Max now works on the commercial side of the family business, and he ran us through the estate one vineyard at a time.

 

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

 

We'll have a short word on the German labels, because the words look forbidding but they’re really not. It suffices to know three separate systems run in parallel on a Keller bottle.

The first is the official vineyard classification, a four-tier quality ladder set by the VDP, Germany's top growers' association. It begins with Gutswein, a basic estate wine at the base, to Ortswein (village wine), Erste Lage (premier cru) and finally the Grosse Lage (grand cru) of the highest rank. When a Grosse Lage produces a dry wine, that high-end wine is labelled Grosses Gewächs or “GG”, often embossed on the bottle’s neck.

 

(Source: Melbourne Wine House)

 

The second system is the Prädikat, the ripeness ladder that describes the sugar level in the grapes at harvest (not the wines). From lightest to most concentrated: Kabinett (barely-ripe), Spätlese (riper fruit), Auslese (late harvest), Beerenauslese (concentrated with noble rot), Trockenbeerenauslese (very concentrated with noble rot) and Eiswein (concentrated frozen grapes). Max noted the estate has not made one in twenty years, because the winters no longer reliably get cold enough.

The third system is the sweetness of the finish wine, which is entirely separate from the Prädikat. Trocken (dry), Halbtrocken or the looser unofficial term feinherb (off-dry), Lieblich (semi-sweet) and Süss (fully sweet). This distinction matters because a Spätlese can be either trocken or sweet depending on how the winemaker chose to ferment it.

Two other terms come up throughout the piece. A monopole is a vineyard owned entirely by one estate, with no other producers permitted a share of it. Spätburgunder is the German name for Pinot Noir.

A Swiss refugee and a church vineyard

The family’s roots in the region date back to the late 18^th century. In the chaos of the French Revolution, a Swiss émigré named Johann Leonhard Keller crossed into the German Palatinate and settled in Dalsheim. He had good relations with the local clergy, and in 1789 those connections let him buy a piece of land that had belonged to the church: the Oberer Hubacker. That vineyard has stayed in the family ever since, which now runs to around ten generations, with Max and his younger brother Felix the tenth. The vineyard's name is older still, traced to a 1490 parish record and a medieval unit of farmland, the Hube, that became Hubacker.

 

 

The estate dates itself to 1789, and you will see that on every label. But the man who turned a farm into a wine business with a name on the label was a later Keller, Georg, Max’s great-great-grandfather, who started selling his wine in bottle from 1921.

The slow post-war revival of a region

For American and European drinkers in the 1970s and ‘80s, Liebfraumilch – the soft, sweet, semi-anonymous white that dominated the German wine export market for two or three decades and filled supermarket shelves – was mainly made with fruit from the Rheinhessen region. Liebfraumilch became a widely commoditised wine made with roughly ten times the sugar one would find in a modern dry white. By the late 1980s the category had become a cultural shorthand for unsophisticated taste in Britain. Rheinhessen did not become a byword for cheap wine because of a failing of its own. It became one because it was the engine room of a category that the whole market eventually turned against.

 

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

 

Few of Germany's regions suffered greater post-war indignities.

But it had not always been that way, Max's father, Klaus-Peter Keller, has said so. Before the wars, German sparkling, or German Sekt, was a real rival to Champagne. Klaus-Peter's favourite proof is that when the Titanic left Southampton in 1912 the most expensive sparkling wine on board was a German one. His blunt summary was that when the Titanic sank, so did German Sekt fall in the same era, helped down by two world wars, a wine trade in part in Jewish hands that the Nazis destroyed, and a post-war turn to high yields and cheap sweetness.

 

The downfall 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.

 

Into that opening stepped a handful of growers who had enough psychological distance from the war to “wonder what had been lost” in writer Boris Fishman’s words. They began bottling their own wine instead of selling grapes to co-operatives, picked by hand, revived abandoned slopes, and many went organic. Klaus Keller senior – the father of Klaus-Peter Keller– was one of them. Always with the belief that his soils could produce dry Riesling of outstanding quality, Klaus Keller Sr began the important work of building the estate’s quality reputation in the 1980s.

While Weingut Keller’s modern reputation lies in dry Rieslings, back in Klaus Sr’s time though, the estate’s focus remained on traditional off-dry and sweet Rieslings . By the 1980s, Riesling had fallen to roughly five per cent of everything planted in Rheinhessen, pulled out in favour of higher-yielding, blander crossings such as Bacchus and Optima that fed the Liebfraumilch machine. Klaus Sr ignored convention and kept the estate in Riesling when the region had all but given up on it – farming for quality when most of his neighbours farmed for volume. His recognition came right at the end of his time in charge: in 2000, his final vintage, the German Gault Millau guide named him its Winemaker of the Year.

 

(Source: Weingut Keller)

 

His son, Klaus-Peter, trained at the Geisenheim wine school, spent time in South Africa, and then went to Burgundy, where in 1993 he interned at Domaine Armand Rousseau in Gevrey-Chambertin, one of the most revered red-wine addresses anywhere. Klaus-Peter returned home in 1999 with more than a feel for Pinot Noir: he came back with questions about his own region's past.

The church had shaped vineyards in Burgundy, he reasoned, and the church had been just as active at home, so he and his father started hunting through medieval texts to see what the Hügelland had once been.

What Klaus Sr and Jr found reframed the whole estate. In the 14th century the best slopes of the Hügelland had been worked by monks from the abbeys of Schönau and Lorsch, ranked among Germany's finest, and farmed with the same fuss over tiny differences in site that the Cistercians applied on Burgundy's Côte d'Or. The land Keller sits on was not undiscovered. It had simply been forgotten after the middle ages, buried first under a colder climate of Europe’s “Little Ice Age” that lasted until the mid-19^th century. This colder climate unfortunately prevented fruit in the Hügelland where Keller today sits to get reliably ripe enough. This region was thus forgotten and came under a century of bulk wine.

Klaus-Peter's reading of the present followed from that history. A warming climate, he realised, has turned the tables back: in the inland limestone hills the estate can now reach full ripeness almost every year. He has gone as far as to call his corner a beneficiary of climate change.

The gamble that paid off: turning to dry Riesling

Under Klaus Sr, the estate was famous for traditional off-dry and sweet Riesling, the styles its loyal customers came for. Now, what Klaus-Peter realised, coming home with a Burgundian eye, was that the family's limestone could do something his father had never asked of it: profound dry Riesling.

 

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

 

Klaus-Peter already had experience making his first dry Riesling as a Geisenheim student around 1996. Dry Riesling at the family estate could be built on minerality and precision rather than sweetness. The chalky clay-marl of Kirchspiel, Abtserde, Morstein and Hubacker is the key. It is the kind of soil that gives intensely mineral wine, closer in spirit to the great dry Rieslings of Alsace than to the slate of the Mosel. Climate change supplied the last piece: dry Riesling only works if, before vinification, the grapes ripen fully, and inland. For the first time in generations, they reliably did.

None of this was safe. Going dry risked alienating the very customers who had built the estate's name on sweetness. Klaus-Peter had his wife, Julia, had hard conversations at the kitchen table about what they could afford to attempt.

The gamble paid off. The switch became real with the 2001 vintage, when the first Keller Grosses Gewächs and the first Keller G-Max both appeared and the dry single-vineyard Rieslings moved to the centre of the estate.

The estate’s early fame was domestic, carried by the German guides through the 2000s: Gault Millau rated the estate's collection among the country's best for several years running, Vinum named it Winery of the Year in 2006, while Gault Millau later honoured Klaus-Peter with a series of winemaker awards. The international turning point came around 2008, when Jancis Robinson said that to show how great dry German Riesling could be she would choose a Keller, and famously called the estate’s wines the “German Montrachets”.

 

(Source: Christie's Auction)

 

Merchants have quoted it ever since, and the auction houses have run with it: Christie's once asked whether G-Max is the Montrachet of Germany, to which a New York rival shot back by asking whether Montrachet is the G-Max of Burgundy. From there the wines moved through serious importers and onto collector lists, and almost everything now sells on allocation, in mixed cases, before bottling. Weingut Keller is without a doubt the most established estate in all of Rheinhessen today. And dry Rieslings had made Keller arguably Germany's greatest estate for the style. The wines that might have turned off the traditional sweet Riesling-loving customers have become the jewels of the cellar.

An estate built on limestone

If you want to know why Keller's dry wines taste the way they do, you talk about rock. Most of Weingut Keller’s land lies in Wonnegau, the southern part of Rheinhessen inland from Worms, where the rock is the floor of a warm sea that covered the area tens of millions of years ago; the same family of calcareous stone runs under Burgundy's Côte d'Or, which is part of why this comparison with Burgundy keeps returning.

The home slope is the Hubacker, the limestone monopole planted almost entirely to Riesling, where the iconic limestone tower of the estate stands. Max shared with us the real story of why the tower was built that had nothing to do with the quality of the wie. This tower was specifically built by his grandfather (Klaus Sr) for his grandmother, Hedwig Keller, before she passed away. This slope was Hedwig’s favourite place outside the village, and he simply wanted to give her a last gift she could see from below.

 

 

The two slopes that made the estate's name alongside Hubacker sit in the Westhofen commune of Wonnegau. Morstein is the heavyweight: a long south-facing ridge, documented as a vineyard as far back as 1282, with heavy clay marl over massive water-bearing limestone that keeps the vines fed even in a dry year. It gives a Riesling of real power. Where Morstein is brawn, Kirchspiel is poise. Kirchspiel is cooler and sheltered, opening like an amphitheatre towards the Rhine. Max noted that Kirchspiel is unusually well protected from wind, which is part of its more delicate character.

Above Morstein sits the slope the family may guard most jealously. The vineyard is officially Brunnenhäuschen, but the prime cut within it is an old field-name, Abtserde, recorded around 1280 as "an aptes Erden", roughly “the abbot's earth”. It has the highest active lime content of any site in Westhofen, is stained red by iron into a kind of terra rossa, and has a spring running beneath it. The Kellers bottle it as the Keller Abts E Riesling. This is the wine that needs the most time. Abtserde is so intensely limestone-driven that, when young, its wine can taste especially tight. This wine is built to be bottle aged longer than its siblings for its mineral, acid, fruit, texture and structure to settle.

 

 

Around Dalsheim, Bürgel is the home of the Burgundian grapes on ochre, lime-rich Terra Fusca soil, and Frauenberg is the late-ripening site for Pinot Noir and an older parcel of Chardonnay. There is also Silberberg in Monsheim, a source for the rare, racy Rieslaner.

North of the Wonnegau, directly along the Rhine near Nierstein, runs the Roter Hang, the red slope of iron-red slate, Mosel-steep, with the river bouncing light onto the vines. This is a completely different geology from the pale Wonnegau limestone: weathered red slate that stores heat, which kept this strip ripe even when the wider region ran cold. Keller took on two parcels here, Pettenthal and Hipping, in 2011.

Max told us the back story: the former owner, Franz Karl Schmitt, was closing his winery and offered Keller the whole thing, eleven hectares. Keller declined and asked only for the two best pieces. Offered eleven hectares, Keller bought less than one. Weingut Keller has a certain philosophy that great winery does not have to grow: it seemed that every time the family acquires a new parcel, it gives another away.

 

 

The estate sits at around 18 to 21 hectares, roughly 70 per cent Riesling, and means to stay there. Max put the production at between 100,000 and 120,000 bottles a year, almost all of it sold on allocation.

Oh and fun fact: wine from Pettenthal, Max said, had once been on the Titanic's wine list! The estate has sent bottles to Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, even a baby wine for her great-grandchildren.

How wine is made at Weingut Keller

The Keller family thinks of themselves first as growers. The obsession lives in the vineyard. The single strangest detail is the land survey: the soils under the estate were mapped with some 70,000 boreholes to read what lay beneath each plot. Old vines are an article of faith, and only fruit from vines at least twenty-five years old goes into the dry single-vineyard wines, with younger fruit, even from grand-cru sites, diverted into the entry Von der Fels wine.

Significant work happens even before the grapes enter the cellar. In classic Burgundian fashion, the family does tight planting. In the Zellertal they are planting a staggering 36,000 vines per hectare, against a modern premium norm of only eight to ten thousand. The theory is that vines made to compete root more deeply and crop less. Each vine yields almost nothing, the canopy shades the soil, and the slopes are too steep and too dense for machines, so Max said the work is done with small old tools, animal power, and a flame burner for weeding the steepest rows.

 

(Source: Weingut Keller)

 

Pruning, leaf-pulling and shoot work are done by hand, and the canopy is tuned plot by plot to how much water the ground holds, with more leaves stripped in sunny Nierstein than in cool Westhofen, so the grapes finish late, usually in November, yet the dry Rieslings rarely climb above thirteen per cent alcohol.

Harvest is by hand, in several passes, with rotten or unripe berries sorted out in the vineyard and again in the cellar. For the top dry wines the bunches sit on their skins for up to a day, and by some accounts longer, before pressing, then go into an old vertical basket press rather than a fast modern one. That slow press is Felix's job.

 

(Source: Weingut Keller)

 

Max described a daily ritual in which the whole team, ten to fifteen including apprentices and interns, eats lunch together with wine and runs a blind tasting of bottles from around the world. The point being to stretch young palates so they go home more ambitious about the wine they’re helping make.

In the cellar the rule is, in the estate's words, as much as necessary and as little as possible: spontaneous fermentation on wild yeasts, low temperatures, a long rest on the lees, ageing in steel or in large, old, neutral casks rather than new oak – which still lends a slightly savoury, faintly bready depth and a rounder texture with minimal oak. The main exception is the estate’s ultra premium Keller G-Max which usually ferments in a 1,000-litre Fuder, the traditional barrel of the Mosel rather than the Rhine, because the cask was Hedwig's and she came from the Mosel.

The most expensive dry Riesling in the world

You cannot tell this story without the Keller G-Max Riesling.

Start with the fruit, because that is where the answer lives. The G-Max is made from a single parcel of very old vines in an unspecified Grosses Gewächs site with stony soil over limestone with an ideal angle to the sun in Dalsheim, cropped at a punishingly low 25 to 30 hectolitres per hectare. A low yield concentrates everything: fewer bunches per vine means more of the plant's energy goes into each grape, which is the least glamorous but most dependable route to intensity in wine. The vines are especially old, with roots running deep to offer balance without weight in the wine.

Interestingly, Weingut Keller will not identify the parcel used to make the G-Max. The reason is not theatre but pragmatism. An earlier wine from old vines had clusters of its grapes stolen after visitors were shown the exact spot. The family’s worry is not fanciful.

 

(Source: Simion Marian)

 

Besides the incredible quality of the fruit, it's been asserted that there is no cellar trick to this cuvee, according to some observers. The G-Max is supposedly made in a similar way as the other dry Rieslings of the estate with wild-yeast fermentation and a long maturation on the full lees. The only quirk is the cask, a 1,000-litre Mosel Fuder rather than the Rhine's oval Stück, and even that is sentiment rather than technique, because the barrel was Hedwig's and she came from the Mosel.

The origin of the name is plain once Max shared it. The very first wine, the 2000, came from old Hubacker vines, was called “Hubacker Max”, and was never meant for sale as it was the family's private bottle. The family eventually decided to let a few bottles go. From 2001 the wine became G-Max, the ‘G’ for Georg, the great-grandfather who first bottled the family's wine in 1921, and ‘Max’ for Maximilian, the elder son who led my tasting.

The answer to how this private family wine became a global trophy perhaps lies in a mix of quality, scarcity and it status of being the first young dry Riesling ever awarded a perfect score by a major American wine critic.

 

(Source: Weingut Keller)

 

Production is minuscule with under 2,000 bottles in a normal year. The estate compounds the scarcity through how it sells. Rather than offering G-Max on its own, the family bundles it inside a mixed case alongside its Grosses Gewächs. What you cannot buy easily, the secondary market prices, and the auction headlines did the rest. Then came the moment that fixed its status. In 2014 the American critic John Gilman made the Keller G-Max 2012 the first young, dry Riesling ever awarded a perfect score. Add the romance of the secret parcel and the Montrachet comparisons traded publicly between Christie's and a rival auction house and the cult more or less builds itself.

 

 

Today almost the entire run goes into the Kellerkiste, a case of five Riesling GGs plus one G-Max. Bought from the estate the case costs a little over 1,500 US dollars; on the secondary market it runs to around 4,000. The auction numbers are startling. In 2010 the G-Max became the most expensive dry Riesling ever sold at auction, and the records kept climbing: a double magnum of the 2009 went for 3,998.40 euros at a German auction in 2014, and by 2019 a single bottle was changing hands at around 2,541 US dollars, perhaps the only dry wine on the list of the top ten priciest German wines.

The wine that now sells for the price of a small car began as the family's research plot according to Klaus-Peter. He has said the point of it was constant improvement, that ideas were tried on the G-Max first and rolled out to the other wines later.

“Red Riesling”, fizz and the Abbot's earth

It would be a mistake to reduce Weingut Keller to one expensive bottle.

Riesling is about eighty per cent of what Keller makes, and the family has built it into a clear ladder, from a wine for a Tuesday up to bottles that need a decade.

 

 

The way in is the Keller Von der Fels Riesling, whose name means roughly "from the rock". It is a dry Riesling drawn from young vines in the estate's top sites, including young Hubacker fruit, and it is Klaus-Peter's own everyday drinking wine, which is the highest compliment a grower pays a bottle. It carries the house signature, the cool, saline, citric precision. A step up, and still gentle on the wallet, is the Keller Limestone Riesling, a blend across the estate's limestone sites that is made both as a dry wine and as a lightly sweet Kabinett. Then comes the Keller RR Riesling, the insider's pick, from a red-rock parcel in the Kirchspiel, made off-dry in the looser feinherb style, and rated by German critics as the equal of a Grosses Gewächs at a fraction of the price. Klaus-Peter has joked that in a good year the RR stands for Rolls Royce.

Above them are the Grosses Gewächs Rieslings, the grand crus. The Keller Oberer Hubacker GG Riesling is made from the fruit harvested from the iconic Oberer Hubacker monopole under the tower – it is described as expressing power held in precision. The Keller Abts E Riesling is from the Abtserde field of the Brunnenhäuschen vineyard, which sits on the highest concentration of active lime of any site. This wine is the most ethereal, most coiled, most cellar-demanding wine in the dry range, and rewards a decade of bottle aging.

 

Abtserde grapes in hand (Source: Weingut Keller)

 

Felix Keller has in recent years built a growing range of Chardonnays. The wine most people will meet is the Keller Talfels Chardonnay which is grown on the limestone of the Zellertal, from young high-density vines plus an older Chardonnay parcel in the Frauenberg, then raised around twelve months in barrique with a small proportion of new oak, in a deliberately Burgundian mould. German Chardonnay is having a moment, and the establishment has only just caught up: the VDP did not even allow Chardonnay into its cru classification until the 2023 vintage. Klaus-Peter's argument for planting it is the same climate logic that runs through everything the family does, that the Rheinhessen of today feels like the Burgundy of the early 1990s, and that the grape has a future here that it never had before.

Klaus-Peter also continues to champion the Kabinett, the lightest, lowest-alcohol, gently off-dry style that fell out of fashion as the market today split into bone-dry and lusciously sweet. The Keller Limestone Riesling Kabinett is the everyday, entry-level sweet-leaning counterpart to the drier Keller Limestone mentioned earlier. The particularly famous expression is the Keller "Alte Reben" Riesling Kabinett that comes from a parcel 150 kilometres north to the Schubertslay – a tiny, frighteningly steep parcel above Piesport planted with roughly 120-year-old ungrafted Riesling and owned by a charitable foundation. The young Mosel grower Julian Haart, who had trained at Keller, found the slope no longer paid for the labour it demanded, and the Kellers took over the lease and made their first Schubertslay in 2018. Max framed it as a fixed-term project: a ten-year lease with around two vintages left, after which the family will turn back to Rheinhessen. A magnum of the 2018 reached 5,685.23 euros at auction in 2019, a record for the humble Kabinett category.

 

(Source: Sotheby's)

 

The sweet wines, the Scheurebes, Rieslaners, Auslesen and the rare Beerenauslesen and Trockenbeerenauslesen, are no afterthought and are where Hedwig's Mosel heritage shows in the glass. These last styles are made from individual berries shrivelled by Botrytis cinerea, the so-called noble rot, which concentrates sugar and acid to an extreme; it is slow, risky, hand work, which is the whole reason they are rare.

 

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

 

The reds are where the Burgundy idea comes back. Germany is in fact now the third-largest grower of Pinot Noir in the world, behind France and the United States, and as the climate has warmed the grape has shed much of its old thin, pale reputation. Klaus-Peter makes his Keller Spätburgunder under an idea he sums up as "red Riesling": Pinot chased for freshness and minerality rather than weight, sometimes destemming by hand in the vineyard and leaving the stems to ripen further in the sun before adding them to the ferment. The range runs from a basic estate Réserve up through the Bürgel and Frauenberg grand crus to the rare Keller Felix Spätburgunder from Morstein, named after the younger son, which Max explained was moved to the Morstein because his father felt the wine carrying his son's name should come from the best site.

 

Felix Keller giving his prestige sparkling rosé a taste test (Source: Instagram @keller_felix)

 

And then the bubbles. Felix runs the sparkling programme, made by the traditional bottle-fermented method, mostly from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Max said the estate is now releasing its first single-vineyard Sekt, a 2021 that spent around five years on the lees in a run of roughly 900 bottles, with the wine coming to Singapore for the first time this year.

Wine Review: Weingut Keller Chardonnay Trocken "Talfels" 2023, Rheinhessen

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Pale gold, bright and clear.

Nose: Fragrant and creamy from the outset, chock full of apricot and softer stone fruits. Green apple and gooseberry cut a tarter, greener line through that with candied lemon sitting on top with some more sweet pear and grapefruit lifting it further. The lees come through as a creamy, faintly waxy note that edges towards lanolin. There’s a texture of crispness, a stony minerality, closer to slate, with a lively acidity holding everything in place.

Palate: Generous, but structural and held together. Velvety and slightly oily, with a creamy entry that carries the oak. Light grip underneath it with a fine chalky tug that balances the richness. Gooseberry, white peaches and green apples, then lightly yeasty leesy depths with clotted cream and vanilla running through.

Finish: Medium in length, closing on vanilla and clotted cream with a saline lift.

My Thoughts:

Everyone noted that this is somewhat French in style, and you can taste it. Max told us the Chardonnay spends close to a year in French oak and presumably that is where most of the creaminess comes from. I like that the oak is present but rather well balanced. The limestone keeps a mineral, slightly saline spine under all that clotted cream, so it reads rich without turning heavy. The wax and lanolin is a really nice touch that gives the fragrance a slightly older, more savoury edge than a young Chardonnay usually has. Still settling into itself, but the bones are there.

Wine Review: Weingut Keller Riesling Trocken "Von der Fels" 2024, Rheinhessen

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Pale gold with faint green tint.

Nose: Creamy and bright at the same time, green fruits leading the way with green apple, soft green stone fruits (Japanese ume), a little white peach behind. Lemon and lime run through the middle, white blossom lifts over the top, and there is a flinty, struck-stone edge underneath. A light herbal note threading through the whole thing, and it stays lean, crisp, stony and mineral.

Palate: Driven by lively acidity and generous, but never heavy. There’s a soda-like juiciness keeping everything in motion. Gooseberry and light citrus zest up front, lime and a touch of white peaches behind, a fresh and slightly savoury herbal note of thyme through the middle. Very mineral, with a clear salinity that holds the fruit in line.

Finish: Medium length, closing on zesty lemon peel and sweet citrus, with a saline, grapefruit-like pull underneath and the zesty citrus peel holding on.

My Thoughts:

This is the estate's daily drinker, the "baby GG" as Max called it, drawn from the younger vines across the cru sites and produced in large enough quantities to be opened without ceremony. Tasting the 2024 now, in 2026, two years in bottle seems to have done real work.

Where this would have been more taut and wound up on release, it has in my opinion loosened into something more generous and open, all citrus freshness and soda-like juiciness, while the salinity and mineral grip continue to give it spine. For an entry wine it carries a pleasing amount of detail and layers. The kind of bottle you finish without quite noticing.

Wine Review: Weingut Keller Dalsheimer Oberer Hubacker Riesling GG Trocken Monopol 2024, Rheinhessen

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Pale gold, bright, slight green cast.

Nose: Generous straight out of the glass, full of rich ripe stone fruits with a nice tension of acidity and minerality. Just-ripe apricot and white peach sit at the centre, bright lemon and lime cutting across with green apple giving a tarter, greener edge. Underneath there is a smoky, chalky mineral note, a thread of herbal freshness, and a touch of spice. As it warms it turns creamier, a soft vanilla and leesy roundness.

Palate: Firmer and more cut than the nose suggested with tart stone fruits leading, bright lemon, lime and green apple running through and some white saturn peaches behind. A crumbly, chalky grip that helps the wine attain texture and weight without heaviness. Light salinity under the fruit. The acidity is racy through the middle, then pleasingly softens at the back.

Finish: Medium plus in length. The fruit eases off towards the close, while salinity and stony minerality carry the length, so it finishes lightly stony and savoury even as the acidity relaxes. A faint smoky, mineral dankness lingering where the fruit once was.

My Thoughts

This is the most impressive and powerful one. Hubacker is the family's monopole, the four-hectare slope under the limestone tower Max walked us through, and it shows in the glass: more weight, more grip, more structure than the Von der Fels has any need for. What I keep immediately notice is the tension of acidity and fruitiness, the way the ripe stone fruit and the salty, stony minerality pull against each other. The soft vanilla and leesy creaminess rounds the edges with a grip that keeps this serious. Tasted this young it is already very, very drinkable, but the structure says it has years ahead of it. Of the dry Rieslings, this was the one that felt built to last.

Wine Review: Weingut Keller Westhofener Brunnenhäuschen "Abts E" / Abtserde Riesling GG trocken 2024, Rheinhessen

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Bright pale gold.

Nose: High definition, but cool and elegant. Flint and lemon leading and a tender edge of lemon balm behind. White peach and a cool herbal underneath with some nuances of white pepper spice and a dusting of chalk. The back of the nose turns creamier, a soft vanilla and leesy roundness, though it never weighs the wine down.

Palate: Balanced between citrus and a soft creaminess, with peels and that incredibly fresh, high-definition bright citrus sweetness running right through. Grapefruit and a little ripe apricot fill in behind. There is a fine, salty-chalky grip of the limestone showing itself offering a bit of structure.

Finish: Very long, with the citrus holding and holding. It closes flinty and almost electric, with a salty, chalky minerality through well past the point you expect it to fade.

My Thoughts

Elegance is the first thing that comes to mind here. This is the Abtserde, from the parcel with the highest active lime at the estate, and true to what Max has said, you can taste that limestone directly. The wine is built on stone and high-definition citrus more than on power and weight, which is what sets it apart from the broader, more intense Hubacker. Some tasters find it leaner and more coiled than that, and when young it can read that way. I personally found it had opened up a fair amount with two years in bottle, the citrus more generous and the chalk less severe. It is the slowest of the dry Rieslings to come together, and even when it feels only part of the way there I am enjoying this.

Wine Review: Weingut Keller Spätburgunder Réserve Trocken 2023, Rheinhessen

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Translucent ruby red.

Nose: Fresh and slightly tart with cherry and raspberry first then crushed strawberries. A clean earthiness underneath, a touch of sarsaparilla, and a light rose note lifting the red fruit. A light reductive nuttiness gives the nose a savoury edge.

Palate: Medium bodied, concentrated and earthy. Bold and dense on entry, slightly thicker and more structured than I expected from a wine like this. Red fruit leads the way – cherries, wild strawberries along with light oakiness, vanilla, earthiness and soft cocoa. There’s a certain elegance by mid-palate, where we start seeing silky, very fine tannins and a vibrant acidity take over from the weight, with a mineral edge running under it.

Finish: Light purple florals carry into the finish, with loosened tannins, dark cherries, a spread of spice and touch of savoury chicken stock umami that lingers.

My Thoughts:

This was denser than expected. Most people describe it as elegant and light-footed, built on tension rather than body. I get that, but for me it came on bolder and denser at the beginning before finding a real elegance on the mid-palate, the two sides sitting together rather than fighting. On the whole it does express the house idea Max called "red Riesling": Pinot chased for freshness and minerality rather than weight. I find it very well structured, but never overwhelming. I would also happily give it a few more years for its full potential to unfurl.

Wine Review: Weingut Keller Nieder-Flörsheimer Frauenberg Spätburgunder GG 2023, Rheinhessen

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Ruby red with light rust at the rim.

Nose: Floral, rustic and dense. Tart red fruits lead with a darker berry, blackcurrant, filling in behind, and a sweet potpourri and rose lift sitting over the top. Underneath there is earthiness and a forest-floor, wet-earth savouriness, a bit of rusticity, and a stemmy edge that comes from the whole-cluster fruit. Some sweet cacao oakiness.

Palate: Complex, quite structured, with red currants, raspberries and other tart red fruits up front. A bit of herbs runs through, then it turns darker, dark chocolate and sweet oak on the back, with light aromatic spices alongside. Tannins are firm but fine with fresh acidity at all times and a mineral drive.

Finish: Medium-plus in length. Cacao and a light, powdery sweet oak carry through, with a touch of rose, lively spices and tart red currant holding on at the end.

My Thoughts

Nice boldness and nice structure, with a really pleasing warmth and spice that sits on the back of the throat. This is the Frauenberg, the top Pinot at the estate below only the Morstein "Felix," from a tiny, steep, late-ripening limestone parcel that is the last Pinot the family picks each year. The boldness I got is true to the site, which has always made the firmer, more structured of the Keller reds. But there is a floral, silky lift running alongside the weight, the rose and red fruit lightening what the tannins and oak build, and it gains ground the longer the wine sits. There’s also the stemmy edge coming from the whole-cluster fruit, the cacao and sweet oak from over a year in cask. Bold and structured now, but with the floral side and the freshness to grow into something even more graceful.

Wine Review: Weingut Keller Riesling "Limestone" 2024, Rheinhessen

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Light gold.

Nose: Fresh and mineral up front, then a soft sweetness of orchard fruits: bruised apple, pear, soft peach, with green apple, lime and a little quince sharpening the edges. A flinty, stony note running under the fruit.

Palate: Fresh with great balance of sweetness and the acidity. Lovely soda-like sweetness and zestiness, with juicy grapefruit leading and a touch of pineapple on the riper side. Faint honeyed edge behind the fruit. Richness held in check by light minerality and a clear salinity, and an isotonic-water tone with a backbone of crushed stone.

Finish: Medium in length. Finishing on pomelo and sweet citrus, with the salinity giving it a mouth-watering lift.

My Thoughts

Juicy and sweeter, but still very balanced, with the minerality and a nice zesty acidity keeping it honest. This is the off-dry one, a Kabinett drawn from Kirchspiel and Abtserde fruit and picked earlier than the Von der Fels to hold on to that acidity. Max called it another everyday wine, the bottle for hot weather and spicier food, and I can see exactly why.

The sweetness and juiciness immediately cools the burn, which would make it fantastic with fresh, spicy food, something like a spicy Thai mango salad where the heat and the lime want a semi-sweet wine that pushes back with sweetness and acid at once. Another very easy-to-drink bottle with quite a bit going on underneath.

Wine Review: Weingut Keller Riesling "RR" 2024, Rheinhessen

Tasting Notes

Appearance: A slightly deeper shade of light gold.

Nose: Fresh, crisp and juicy and really nuanced. White peaches lead, with a rocky, slate-like freshness that holds the whole way through. Grapefruit lifts the fruit with a light kitchen-spice warmth. Quite evocative depths of minerality and earthiness with wet stones, moist earth, even a whisper of tobacco.

Palate: Very balanced, very elegant in the way it unfolds. Sweet citrus sweetness leads into green apples and sweet white florals, with pomelo and pink grapefruit rind adding a slightly bitter tone. The red-soil spice threads through, and the mineral note from the nose carries onto the palate, giving it more weight underneath than the nose lets on.

Finish: Long and evocative. Citrus-fruit sweetness giving way to an endless citrus-peel dryness joined by a stony, saline mineral persistence running right to the end.

My Thoughts

The RR is the insider's bottle, an off-dry feinherb from a tiny pocket of red soil sitting inside the Kirchspiel, the red-rock alter ego to the dry Grosses Gewächs off the same slope.

Max joked earlier that in certain vintages the “RR” is regarded as a “Rolls Royce”. This was my favourite of the flight. The 2024 vintage was a fresh, high-acid year, not a warm and ripe one. For the bone-dry GGs that's still excellent, but this high acidity seems to flatter the RR even more. That off-dry feinherb tone harmonises perfectly with the vibrant acidity. This seems so balanced, elegant and poised that plays off the RR’s off-dry profile so well. This one I would reach for again and again.

@CharsiuCharlie