100% Riesling

Food pairings: Seafood, Mediterranean dishes and spicy food.

Winemaking: Select grapes are picked by hand and ferment spontaneously with ambient yeasts in fuders, the traditional 1,200-liter neutral oak casks, in a slow, gentle transformation of around five to six months on the lees. The casks give no wood flavor, but their very slow exposure to oxygen stabilizes the wine naturally. The estate's wines are neither fined nor filtered, and this one is vegan friendly. Feinherb means the wine is neither too sweet nor too dry.

Vineyards and terroir: The fruit comes mainly from Rüdesheim's Berg Roseneck, whose flatter eastern section has loess and loam soils, with grapes from the Bischofsberg, where clay and limestone give rounder wines and the roundness you notice on the first sip. Carl Ehrhard's vines are spread across seven famous Rüdesheim vineyards on the steep banks of the Rhine, with soils ranging from loess and loam to quartzite, red slate and limestone, all farmed organically and biodynamically.

Family and history: Weingut Carl Ehrhard is a family estate in Rüdesheim on the Rhine. The Ehrhard family has grown wine there since 1815, and the present winery was established in 1984. Carl Ehrhard took over from his father in 1998 and runs it with his wife Petra and their three daughters, "following nature" and "returning to the roots." He is the only German winemaker named Rising Star of the Year by both the Eichelmann and Vinum guides, in 2017 and 2020. This wine was formerly labeled Rüdesheim Riesling Kabinett Feinherb.