The 30 top highlights from the new Grosses Gewächs releases

For three days, the soft clinking of glasses, the gurgling of wine, and the clicking of computer keyboards sound like promising whispers through the 129-metre-long columned hall of the Wiesbaden Kurhaus Kolonnade.

The background noise reveals that the preliminary tasting of the latest Grosses Gewächs is taking place.

Every year, the world’s most important wine critics, buyers and sellers, Master Sommeliers, and Masters of Wine come to Wiesbaden, the capital of the state of Hesse for the event organised by the Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter (Association of German Prädikat Wine Estates – VDP) to taste and evaluate the wines that are among the best in Germany.

Caro’s pick of the best new dry German wines listed below

Grosses Gewächs (Große Gewächse), or GGs for short, are the finest dry wines from the highest-ranked vineyards, intended to reflect their origin in the wine itself.

A total of 481 were served in Wiesbaden – the whites mainly from the 2024 vintage and the reds from 2023. They are being released in September and cost between €30 and around €100, sometimes much more, making them wines for special occasions, enthusiasts, connoisseurs, and collectors, as well as for upscale restaurants.

The tasting in Wiesbaden offers experts a unique overview of the different wine regions, grape varieties, and vintages.

The 2024 whites

The 2024 vintage was not an easy one for winegrowers. A warm March was followed by relentless late frosts in April that froze the first buds. This phenomenon decimated the harvest, especially in the Mosel and Nahe regions.

Winemakers such as Anne and Cornelius Dönnhoff from Oberhausen an der Nahe lost up to 80% of their grapes. In some vineyards, there was simply nothing left.

Friends and colleagues made their vineyards available to them for cultivation. Thus, 2024 was the first vintage in which the Dönnhoffs produced wine in Rheinhessen and the Pfalz (Palatinate) to compensate for part of their losses.

However, what survived in the best sites, such as Dellchen, produced one of the best Rieslings in years.

Overall, 2024 was perceived as a cool year, which is also reflected in the temperature sum between 1 April and 30 September, as represented by the Huglin Index (an index that records the total heat sum of temperatures above 10°C during the growing season).

In 2024, the total was only 1,635 in the Pfalz, compared with 1,877 in the warm year of 2022. In tasting terms, this simply meant that the acidity in some wines was remarkably high.

This made the Riesling GG wines from the even cooler Mosel among the least successful of 2024. Since a Große Gewächs must, by definition, be a dry wine, Mosel winegrowers had to force their wines into a dry corset.

The interplay of acidity and residual sweetness above nine grams is reserved exclusively for Prädikat wines in the VDP. One way to reduce the naturally high acidity levels in the must is to macerate white grapes on the skins, but this has the side effect of leaching out bitter notes.

Sour and bitter – and in amounts that were simply too much in some Mosel Rieslings.

A surprise winner

In contrast, Rheinhessen proved to be strong. The vineyards along the Roter Hang (Red Slope) on the Rhine between Nierstein and Nackenheim – including the Hipping and Pettenthal sites – which tend to suffer in warm years, benefited from the cooler conditions, and the wines appeared slim, elegant, and exciting.

While Klaus Peter Keller’s Rieslings from the Abtserde or Morstein sites are usually at the top of the range, his Riesling from Pettenthal is in top form in 2024. ‘Typical for such a cool year,’ comments Keller.

Outstanding results also came from the Nahe and Pfalz. Stylistically, the Nahe Rieslings have settled on the positive side between the usual Mosel and Rheinhessen styles.

Emrich-Schönleber’s Frühlingsplätzchen is one such classic: graceful and delicate. In the Pfalz, Philipp Kuhn’s wines lead the ratings alongside Christmann, Rebholz, and Dr Wehrheim.

Silvaner in Franken clearly did not cope well with the rainfall and cool temperatures in September. Unlike Riesling, the traditionally dry Silvaner wines cannot conceal anything with residual sweetness. Even the best examples, such as Weltner’s Echter-Berg or Wirsching’s Kammer, seemed somewhat edgy.

The winner of the 2024 vintage, however, was Pinot Blanc (Weissburgunder). It’s a variety Alsatian winemakers in particular like to look down on but sometimes, like this time, it can rival Chardonnay with its approachability and sheen.

With 6,300 hectares (Source: The German Wine Institute, DWI) planted, mainly in Baden and the Pfalz, Germany is the world leader in Pinot Blanc.

Hansjörg and his sons Valentin and Hans from the Ökonomierat Rebholz winery in the Pfalz produce Pinot Blancs that are in a class of their own. Salwey in Baden and Dr Wehrheim, also in the Pfalz, can keep up, however.

The 2023 dry reds

Unlike white wines, red GG wines must be aged for two years before they can be released on the market. Most of the reds served in Wiesbaden, therefore, were from the 2023 vintage.

Here, too, there were extreme weather conditions ranging from drought to heavy rainfall, but the late warm summer apparently made up for some of this with the Pinot Noir (Spätburgunder) grapes.

After the magnificent 2022 Pinot Noir vintage, expectations were not particularly high at first, but the 2023 wines impressed with their freshness, clear fruit, fine acidity, and Burgundian elegance.

The usual suspects proved themselves once again: Fürst with Centgrafenberg from Franconia, and Huber with Schlossberg and Bienenberg from Baden are at the top of the list.

Our top 30 wines – 15 whites and 15 reds from the 2025 GG release

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