100% Riesling

Food pairings: Fish, poultry, spicy Asian dishes, and mildly seasoned cheeses.

Winemaking: Picked by hand from vines 80 to 85 years old and fermented spontaneously with wild yeasts in stainless steel, with no added yeasts or enzymes and no acidification or deacidification. After a long rest on its lees, the wine was bottled with only a minimal addition of sulfur. The "-T-" on the label is the estate's house code; residual sugar sits near 15 g/L while bright acidity makes the wine taste nearly dry.

Vineyards and terroir: The fruit comes from a newly acquired parcel in the windswept Schneidersberg, part of the Thörnicher Berg in a side valley behind the main Ritsch. Unlike most of the estate's south-facing sites, it faces southwest, and its old vines grow on steep slate. 2022 was the first vintage the estate made from this parcel. The Ritsch, Thörnich's great steep vineyard, is famous for raw, tensile wines that many compare with those of the Saar and Ruwer.

Family and history: Weingut Hermann Ludes in Thörnich was founded in the 1950s by Hermann Ludes. His son, also named Hermann, spent a lifetime in the vineyards making wines his own uncompromising, old-school way, and today the young Julian Ludes works alongside his uncle Hermann. In 2022 the estate made nine different wines, every one of them a Kabinett.

In the pictures: Julian Ludes in the vineyard (photo: vom Boden).