Rescuing Ruwer Riesling in 2014 ... and Beyond

BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT | SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

The Ruwer is a tiny Mosel tributary that enters the Mosel just downstream from Trier. Only its last three miles are flanked by vines, and then sporadically, representing a surface area far smaller than it was in the mid-20th century, let alone 175 years ago when Karl Marx, himself the inheritor of family vine acreage at the edge of today’s Maximin Grünhaus Herrenberg, penned an impassioned plea on behalf of his beleaguered fellow wine growers. But even before the late 19th-century rise of Mosel Riesling to international consciousness and prestige, the few top blue and red slate sites along this stream were already locally renowned, in particular the monopole holdings of Carthusian monks (Karthäuserhof) and of the Abbey of St. Maximin in Trier (Maximin Grünhaus), as well as the Kaseler Nies'chen.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the von Schuberts at Maximin Grünhaus, with their cellarmaster and vineyard manager Alphonse Heinrich, consistently delivered Rieslings whose complexity and ageworthiness few if any other German estates could match. A few hundred yards away, Peter Geiben got serious about quality and in 1988 began rendering Rieslings that occasionally challenged those of his more famous neighbor. And Christoph Tyrell, after inheriting responsibility for the Karthäuserhof in 1986, brought the quality of that estate’s wines back into line with its exalted reputation. At that time, I regularly referred to the Ruwer as among the most consistent sources of Riesling quality anywhere in the world. Two other principle landholders—Reichsgraf von Kesselstatt (headquartered here) and Erben von Beulwitz (acquired in 1982 by local restaurateur and hotelier Herbert Weis)—did their part to uphold high standards, although Trier’s ecclesiastical estates, long important players here, were by then in decline.