Homes Away from Home

BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT | DECEMBER 19, 2017

On Sunday, December 17, two of Germany’s most highly reputed Riesling estates—one long-established, the other just eight years old—dispatched a simultaneous pair of startling announcements. Klaus Peter and Julia Keller, it seems, are taking control of the parcel in Piesporter Schubertslay that Keller protégé Julian Haart has brought to prominence since leasing it from the Vereinigte Hospitien in 2011. For their part, Julian and Nadine Haart announced the acquisition of a parcel in Flörsheim’s Frauenberg in the Rheinhessen Wonnegau, a site best known through the Pinot Noir that Keller grows there and the Riesling Grosses Gewächs fashioned by Oliver Spanier of Weingut Battenfeld-Spanier. 

The accounts given by Klaus Peter Keller and Julian Haart are remarkably similar and, to anyone who knows them well, entirely plausible. “Ever since my time at the Keller winery,” explained Haart, “not only have Julia, Klaus Peter and their sons Felix and Max become a part of our own family, Flörsheim-Dalsheim has also become something of a second home for us. The limestone-rich soils of this sector fascinated us and we are delighted that now we can render  Rieslings there.”