If I remembered anything about Rheinhessen, the largest wine region in Germany, from my WSET Level 3 textbook, it was that there wasn’t much to remember. With the exception of several renowned producers like Klaus Peter Keller, it was vast and flat, its output forgettable.
But then, in early 2025, I started seeing its name again and again in the newsletter I receive from Leon & Son in Brooklyn, one of the most forward-looking wine shops in the country. It appeared next to words like “Next-Gen” and “guts” and “in the face of tradition.” What was happening in Rheinhessen?
Rheinhessen wasn’t always a “backwater,” in the words of one importer. It was warmer in Europe 500 years ago, grapes ripened more reliably, and the region’s wines graced the tables of bishops. Even when the climate turned cold, one part of the Rheinhessen stayed ripe enough for distinction: the Roter Hang, the Mosel-steep “Red Slope” of red slate in Rheinhessen’s east, directly on the Rhine, which magnified the heat and mitigated the cold.
Rheinhessen is full of limestone, great not only for still Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, but sparkling, and during the late 19th century, Rheinhessen Sekt was part of a major dialogue between Germany and Champagne. “Krug, Mumm, Heidsieck — those are German names,” Stephen Bitterolf, who runs vom Boden, the pre-eminent American importer of small production German wines, says.
“German sparkling was as famous as Champagne and sometimes even more expensive,” Klaus Peter Keller shares in an email. “When the Titanic left Southampton in 1912, the most expensive sparkling on board was a German one. So you can say when the Titanic sank, also German Sekt culture started to sink. Two World Wars, the wine trade in Jewish hands — the Nazis killed our best ambassadors. After World War II, France continued with high-quality Champagne, and Germany increased the yields and became sweet and cheap.”
“There was a great deal of shame after the war,” Bitterolf says. The Germans wanted to rationalize their madness out of existence. “There was a focus on efficiency, systems, production. That’s how you get the German economic miracle. But you also get scale, estates get bigger, winemakers turn into salesmen.”
The Germans decided to focus on Riesling, forsaking indigenous varieties like Silvaner. “They weren’t that interested in their cultural history,” Bitterolf says. That off-dry Riesling was immensely popular abroad made it harder to change course. Rheinhessen became synonymous with mediocrity: simple, fruity, overcropped, machine-harvested, and heavily filtered wines made with cultured yeast and residual sugar to balance the acidity of a cold climate
Two crises changed the course of Rheinhessen wine: a 1985 wine-adulteration scandal that doomed sweet Riesling, and climate change. “Our climate in Rheinhessen today is a bit like Burgundy in the mid-80s,” Keller says. It seems unnecessary to spell out what Burgundy has achieved since then.
These developments coincided with the emergence of a new generation of winemakers — Wagner-Stempel, Wittmann, Gunderloch, Keller — sufficiently removed from the war to wonder what had been lost. They shifted to estate bottling and hand-harvesting; revived fallow vineyards; converted to organic; and became more precise with soil and clones.
“Keller is radical because he believes that a great winery doesn’t necessarily grow,” Bitterolf says. In 2011, Keller was offered 11 hectares in the Roter Hang. He purchased less than one. To this day, every time the Kellers buy a new parcel, they give another away. As Bitterolf says, “Keller has helped Germany see itself more clearly.”
Keller is only 53, but time moves faster than it used to, and a new generation is taking over in Rheinhessen. They are producing lightly oxidative, zero-zero whites that stand with Jura; Chardonnays and Pinots on the level of Burgundy; and sparkling on par with Champagne. They have a forgiving laboratory: inexpensive, ample land; a history of reinvention; few traditions to contest; a vast diversity of soils; and a sense of community and exchange with no parallel in Germany. “I think [Rheinhessen is] the most dynamic German winegrowing region,” Klaus Peter Keller writes.
The market has noticed. “I’ve been tasting more German wines than French wines at this point,” Jin Ahn, the co-owner of the Hawaiian restaurant noreetuh in New York, says. His list features many Rheinhessen winemakers. “It used to be the reverse. Burgundy Chardonnay is becoming a status symbol rather than a food wine. Meanwhile, Rheinhessen makes world-class Chardonnay and Pinot on its own terms.”
Here are five producers to know, and their standout bottles.
Producer: Moritz Kissinger (Weingut Kissinger)
Benchmark Bottle: Chardonnay
In 2018, Klaus Peter Keller’s son Felix brought him a bottle of Chardonnay made by Moritz Kissinger, a former classmate from the enological school at Geisenheim. Kissinger makes wine in Uelversheim, a limestone-rich middle-of-nowhere village in eastern Rheinhessen that Stephen Bitterolf, who imports him, says “no one had mentioned once in 20 years of traveling to the region. It’s cold there. You’re on the shivering edge of ripeness.” In an Instagram post, Keller stood Kissinger’s Chardonnay next to a 2005 by Gevrey-Chambertin’s Armand Rousseau (where Keller had apprenticed): “I am not sure which of the two bottles … I enjoy more!”
Moritz Kissinger wasn’t sure he wanted to take over his father’s winery. “It’s not work, it’s your life,” he says. “It scared me in the beginning.” He started his first vintage, in 2018, by pruning the Chardonnay vines his grandfather had planted more than 30 years before, as soon as it became legal to plant Chardonnay in Germany for commercial purposes. His father was skeptical — Moritz was pruning very close in order to lower the yield. “But the experience really connected me to this place,” the younger Kissinger says.
Kissinger works oxidatively during fermentation and even performs pumpovers, usually done only for reds, to ensure a fast fermentation, which he believes “saves all the energy in the wine.” In the current vintage of his Chardonnay, you can taste the extended lees contact, the long aging in used oak barrels, the slight nuttiness from oxidation. The reference points — Jura, Burgundy — are clear. But that also fails to capture the wine, which is unlike any other Chardonnay I’ve had: orange blossom, quinine, a gem-like crystallinity, and the salted fruit that is a Rheinhessen hallmark.
“I’ve been tasting more German wines than French wines at this point, It used to be the reverse. Burgundy Chardonnay is becoming a status symbol rather than a food wine. Meanwhile, Rheinhessen makes world-class Chardonnay and Pinot on its own terms.”
“It’s fertile, fruity, gregarious,” Bitterolf says. “There’s just an ease in the Rheinhessen that’s rare.” For Bitterolf, Rheinhessen combines the “textural glaze and force of limestone” with the “herbal and incisive quality” more common from slate. “You get a ton of fruit, but you also get this tensile acidity.” In a world of increasingly leaner whites, that can be a revelation.
Producer: Carsten Saalwächter (Weingut Saalwächter)
Benchmark Bottle: Silvaner Alte Reben
Though his Instagram bio mentions only that he makes Pinot Noir, “Silvaner is my soulmate,” Carsten Saälwachter says. “I have fallen in love.” When Saälwachter inherited the family winery in Ingelheim, in northern Rheinhessen, it was facing poor fortunes. “My father wasn’t very supportive of my ideas, but he knew something had to change,” Saalwächter says. “I didn’t go around the world to make wine with manufactured yeast. I am not Coca-Cola. It’s fine if someone doesn’t like the wine.”
For most of the people who know it, Silvaner — which is ubiquitous in Rheinhessen, where it has grown for 800 years — is, at best, neutrally pleasant. “I thought, these are my oldest vines,” Saalwächter, who also made his first vintage in 2018, says. “We have these amazing, crazy vineyards, but no one talks about this.”
The wine is both saline and botanical: winter sunshine, viscosity, blue water, lemon balm. The fruit is there, but it’s clapping from the bleachers. “You’re tasting soil,” Bitterolf says. “For me, Carsten’s Silvaner is more Chablis than Chablis. It’s got gun flint, it’s stony. You taste most Chablis these days, and it’s oak, fruit, and alcohol. But this has real structure. Carsten loves ripeness. And yet this is only 11.5 percent alcohol.”
Saalwächter makes up for lost acidity through tough pressing. “Pressing is like cooking,” he says. “Nice bitter lemon in the back. Phenolics is the future.”
He takes inspiration from Burgundy — “spontaneous fermentation, aging in wood barrels, not pushing the wine to market too early” — but the exchange ends there. For instance, he uses only tight-grained Spessart German barrels made from slow-growing oak. “I don’t buy oak from France, I don’t want to copy them.” He laughs. “Maybe they should copy us.”
Rheinhessen’s growers have a complex relationship with French winemaking. “We have our own DNA,” Saalwächter, who sets the “vanilla cheesecake character” of so much white Burgundy against the “herbal greenness” of Silvaner, says. “The people who love Chenin from Loire, Savagnin from the Jura, I want them to love the Silvaner from Rheinhessen.”
Producer: Kai Schätzel (Weingut Schätzel)
Benchmark Bottle: Any Riesling under flor
Perhaps no one in the new generation has experimented as much as Kai Schätzel and his partner Jule Eichblatt. In 2008, Schätzel took over a family winemaking operation in Nierstein, in the Roter Hang, so old that “we stopped counting at 650 years,” he jokes. Since then, parts of the Roter Hang have become too warm for winemaking. Eichblatt and Schätzel have experimented with pergola-like systems that create shadow tunnels and flexible bushvine systems that raise fruit off the ground if bad weather is coming. They’ve also used a hectare of Hipping, a Grand Cru vineyard, to plant 250 trees. “If we decide to do something,” Schätzel says, “we try to do it in a proper way.”
“But as we do more manual work,” Eichblatt says, “we save time by using drones for biodynamic spraying, and by letting sheep cut the grass below the vines. We are not only romantic Steiner Demeter people. In five years, perhaps the sheep can be robots.” She sounds nearly optimistic. “In the end, we have so many solutions. We have only started.”
Eichblatt and Schätzel have been able to produce such healthy, stable grapes that they no longer sulfur their wines. As a result, flor began to appear in the barrels — the veil of bacterial yeast more common in production of sherry and Jura whites. “It stabilizes the wines against oxidation,” Schätzel says. “And on the bottom, we still have the original yeast. And with this natural stabilization sandwich, we don’t need additives. From this moment, it was clear there was no way back. It’s possible to make stable, drinkable, healthy wines without any additives.” For many of the Rheinhessen’s young winemakers, yeast is less a flavor enhancer than the gastronomic and chemical key to the wine.
“The wines are infinitely textural,” Andrew Paul Nelson, a co-owner of Golden Sardine, a Riesling-focused wine bar in San Francisco, says. “It’s yeasty, it’s nutty. What people think of as classic Riesling is honestly sulfur. These wines are devoid of that. The aromatics are wild. And that has everything to do with farming, with the raw material of the Rheinhessen right now.”
“You leave completely the world of peach and nectarine, and enter the world of umami,” says Paul Wasserman, the co-director of Becky Wasserman, which imports Schätzel. “There’s this very subtle oxidation, which is amazing for a wine under flor.” (That a venerable and formerly exclusively French importer like Wasserman has begun importing from Germany is perhaps all the evidence one needs that Rheinhessen has arrived.) “The wines have a really nice reduction,” says Juliette Leibrock, who works at Wasserman and interned in Rheinhessen. “You have oxidation and reduction in the same wine.”
Producer: Simone Adams (AdamsWein)
Benchmark Bottle: Lohpfad Chardonnay
Simone Adams had contemplated a career in law before her father, a fourth-generation winemaker, abruptly passed away in 2010. “I had to go away to recognize for myself that it has value, it’s a treasure, actually,” she says. “My mother, brother, and I stood together, and I asked myself, can I really give these vineyards away?”
Adams, who has a doctorate in enology, set to making her agriculture not only biodynamic, but regenerative. “You have to be blind if you don’t understand it,” she says. “Water is the big issue of the future. The extremes are getting stronger and stronger. You have drought, and then you have weeks of rain.”
The new winemaking is farming, and the new farming is endlessly adaptive. “We are constantly listening to what nature is giving us,” she says. “We are constantly adjusting our soil work, our canopy work.” The payoff is that “the wines become more stable, vibrant, lively, complex. They ask for less sulfur. People are amazed how rich the wine tastes although the alcohol level is not high. It’s beautiful to observe.”
Adams uses only German clones for her meticulous Pinots and Chardonnays. Good German Pinot clones tend to have small berries, dark skins, rich phenols, and make high-toned black-fruited rather than red-fruited wine. “Everybody’s always looking at Burgundy clones,” she says. “But in Burgundy, they can’t keep their acidity. Why would I plant their clones?”
Lohpfad, her village-level Chardonnay, is so precise and balanced between ripeness, used oak, and oxygen that it’s hard not to think of her best contemporaries from Burgundy. But when I returned to the bottle several days later, it had evolved into something closer to home, an essence of orange blossom and Japanese salted plum that rounded a hunk of aged gouda into umami splendor.
Producer: Klaus Peter + Felix Keller (Weingut Keller)
Benchmark Bottle: Grande Cuveé Brut Nature
Some parents of the new generation of Rheinhessen winemakers continue to evolve alongside their children, but Klaus Peter Keller may be outpacing them all. In the family’s new acquisitions, in the Zellertal Valley in the Rheinhessen’s southwest, the Kellers are using extreme high-density planting, which “brings deeper roots and much more shadow to the whole system,” according to Klaus Peter. “You have much less evaporation in your vineyards due to more plants — and much more biodiversity.”
Instead of going back to the future, the Kellers are going forward to the past. The standard density for premium wines in Europe is 8,000 to 10,000 vines per hectare. The Kellers are planting 36,000. “Pinot was planted like this in Burgundy 200 years ago,” he says. “Density went to 20,000 when the horse was introduced, to 10,000 when the tractor came. But we tasted some incredible wines from high-density vineyards — 100 years old and still so good.” The yield per vine is minuscule — 50 to 100 milliliters, when the norm, even in premium European wine, is 1 to 2 liters.
“German sparkling was as famous as Champagne and sometimes even more expensive. After World War II, France continued with high-quality Champagne, and Germany increased the yields and became sweet and cheap.”
The negative, Keller says, is it’s very time- and cost-intensive. “But 200 years ago, high-density vineyards were uprooted every 150 years. Today, schools recommend to uproot every 25 to 30 years. Do you think this is a sustainable approach? We don’t.”
Keller’s son Felix is in charge of the sparkling and Chardonnay. He is as introverted as Keller Sr. is gregarious; he has been making wine since he was 9. The Sekt of Felix’s that I tasted, known as the Grande Cuvée, a non-vintage blend anchored by Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, is as airy as lace: lightly yeasty; gently redolent of ginger candy, green apple, and lemon oil; and with a delicate bitterness on the finish. It is soft-spoken and ineluctably suave.
“What we plant today is for the next generation,” Keller says. “We must always try to plan 40/50 years in advance. I am very confident that we now have a generation that will preserve this treasure.”
Also look for the wines of: Bastian Beny, Gunderloch, Lena Singer-Fischer, and Martin Otto Wörner.
