Emrich-Schönleber "Riesling Estate Trocken" Nahe, Germany 2025

FROM VOM BODEN:

THE WINE: This is what an estate wine should be, the calling card of a winery. Schönleber’s estate Riesling tends to be light, bouncier and airier than you might guess, based on the stately elegance of the Grand Crus.

THE PRODUCER: If we consider the holy trilogy of the Nahe (Dönnhoff, Emrich-Schönleber and Schäfer-Fröhlich), Emrich-Schönleber for me rests somewhere in the center. They are neither as baroque and lavish as Dönnhoff, nor as fiercely angular as Schäfer-Fröhlich. There is a balance, a center to the best of their wines that is about as perfect and meditative as Riesling ever gets: texture and glycerin matched to a chiseled, yet glossy and ultra-fine architecture. Wines that showcase fruit of clarity and purity, yet balance this with an equally forceful presentation of soil and mineral.

With Emrich-Schönleber, we are not in the limestone Rheinhessen. The upper part of the Nahe, where the three grand vineyards of Emrich-Schönleber are, is a world of slate, both blue-gray and red. The Halenberg and tiny Auf der Ley is largely the former, with blue-gray slate that shapes a wine of rigor, density and power. This is perhaps the more mineral, more ageworthy of the two Grand Crus. The Frühlingsplätzchen has veins of red slate and always seems more expansive, diffuse, lighter and finessed. It is a wine with a stunning florality and vivid aromatics; it is more expressive in youth. And while the three Grand Cru GGs are simply among the greatest dry Rieslings made in Germany, period, the focused portfolio of Emrich-Schönleber is worth exploration.