The Schonfels is a cliff vineyard where 100-year-old ungrafted vines present minerality in its most pure and severe form.
There is a rather short list of places, and of wines, whose fundamental thrill is the most dramatic and incisive presentation of rock, mineral, and saline essentialness.
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Chablis’ famed Valmur, Corton-Charlemagne, and Meursault’s Perrieres. In the world of Riesling, the headliners would be Alsace’s Clos Ste. Hune and the Rheinhessen’s Morstein. Lauer’s dry Riesling Schonfels GG belongs on this shortlist.
This is hardly a bold suggestion: Savvy collectors and Riesling-heads have been hunting this bottle for a decade. It is one of Lauer’s most cult bottles.
The profundity, the soul, of this wine is always its depth and incisive purity. This is a wine where perhaps vintage means less; the signature of the vineyard is simply irrefutable.
The 2022 comes to us with all of the depth of the 2020, yet it is more compact than one might expect, as if the cut of the 2021 echoed in the cellar enough to influence this bottle.
In any vintage, the wine is a monument to this extreme vineyard.
Situated at the top of a 60-meter cliff, the vineyard leans at a precarious angle, far above the Saar, and is blasted by the cool winds pouring down from the highlands to the east. Lauer can harvest the vineyard nearly two weeks after his warmest sites, and still, the Schonfels is defined by its freshness.
It is this extreme environment combined with some of the oldest vines in the Saar that shape this wine, year after year, into one of the most riveting dry Rieslings of this hallowed valley.
Order now, but feel free to bury this in the coldest corner of the cellar for 10+ years. If you open it sooner, note that the bottle will drink best 2-5+ days after opening, so prepare yourself for a journey.
To order, email offers@crushwineco.com or call the store at (212) 980-9463.
Joe Salamone
Wine Buyer
Crush Wine & Spirits
