Press

Our German Wine of the Year for 2022, the Künstler Riesling Rheingau Hölle GG 2021, says so much about the radical transformation German wine has undergone during recent years and about what makes high-end offerings from the country such a great choice today.

Drinking wine is a fleeting pleasure. You sniff, sip, savor it in your mouth, swallow and move onward. Soon enough, the wine is gone. What sets wine apart are the memories after consumption. Wine’s power to conjure up a moment, an emotion and a sense of time and place is uncanny.

The salty, savory flavors of a good charcuterie board are an easy way to please a crowd this holiday season, but what about the best wine pairings?

First, forget everything you’ve been told about pairing wine with turkey. It’s the Thanksgiving host’s eternal conundrum: The turkey is ordered, the menu’s sorted, and the guest list is all set, but now you need to decide which wines to serve along with the feast.

Profoundly complex and expressive of the most exacting intricacies of terroir, the wines of Germany are among the most iconic and revered in the world. Remarkably, they are also among the most undervalued and misunderstood.

Crystalline, laser-like, pure, precise—these are the words that have come to define Mosel riesling. Can a place so bound by technical winemaking carve out space for natural wine?

2011 to 2020 was the warmest decade on record for planet Earth, according to United Nations. The global wine industry, which is largely the product of the growing environment of each vineyard within unique production regions, is reporting that changes in the climate are impacting traditional methods and expectations.

We tasted a whopping 2,802 wines during September from 15 countries, and right at the top of our ratings were some outstanding 2021 German rieslings from the Mosel and Rheingau regions of the country. In fact, five of the rieslings we rated from these two places received scores of 100.