From: Mosel, Germany
Varietal: Pinot Blanc

Taste: I’ve tasted a few vintages of Falkenstein’s Weissburgunder and am thrilled to report that 2022 may be my favorite thus far. Vivid, bright, fresh, classy, and weightlessly silky. Beneath all the gorgeous Asian pear, white flower, and green apple vibes, this wine rides on a tightrope of river stone minerality to its lifted, ethereal finish.

Pairing: You’ve got a ton of options here. This versatile Weissburgunder will make any evening or afternoon wonderful by itself or with everything from brunch options to the main course at dinner. Some specific examples include serving this with quiche, croque monsieur, or madame, poached salmon or salmon Rillettes, smoked trout rillettes, or as a spread, roasted chicken of all persuasions (check out the recipe below!), roasted duck with orange and ginger or Peking duck with a honey and five-spice glaze, and even roasted turkey and gravy.

Peruvian Roasted Chicken With Spicy Cilantro Sauce
By Melissa Clark

About. The Weber family farms about 13ha of mainly old Riesling vines in a side valley of the Saar known as Tälchen (“little valley”). In 1985, Erich Weber and his wife, Marita, built up the property of the then-dilapidated Falkensteinerhof (established in 1901) from scratch.

Today, Erich is joined by his middle son, Johannes, to produce some of the most authentic wines in the Saar. The Weber's top vineyard sites are located on various south- facing hillsides of primarily iron-rich gray slate with some quartz, including the highly prized sites of Niedermenniger Herrenberg, Niedermenniger Sonnenberg, Krettnacher Altenberg, and the once legendary Euchariusberg.

The average age of their vines is 40 to 50 years of age, and the oldest is more than 90 years old with over one hectare of ungrafted vines. The Webers work close to organic with no herbicides and a healthy cover crop and believe in low yields (one flat cane per vine). All the grapes are hand-harvested, and whole Riesling grapes are gently pressed in a pneumatic press for two to three hours. Besides Riesling, the Webers have some parcels of Pinot Blanc (Weissburgunder) and Pinot Noir (Spätburgunder), the latter one of the best examples on the Saar and Mosel.

The musts flow via gravity into the cellar below for natural sedimentation overnight before being vinified exclusively with ambient yeasts in 1,000-liter ancient oak Fuder casks and a couple of 500-liter Halbfuder, the traditional fermenting and aging vessels for Mosel wine.

The Webers like to bottle each Fuder separately, which is unheard of today, even though it was the standard in old times. Therefore, they can have two or more casks from the same vineyard site and with the same Prädikat. However, these wines will have different AP numbers because they come from different parcels of the same vineyard site and were fermented, aged, and bottled separately. All of this work results in an array of green-tinted, light-bodied, high-acid, unchaptalized dry (trocken), off-dry (feinherb), and fruity Saar wines, all of which are true cask-by-cask bottlings.