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Katharina Wechsler | Rheinhessen
2023 Dry Riesling Crus
Delayed by general disruptions and tariff-stalled markets over the last year, the 2023 vintage of Katharina Wechsler’s dry Rieslings crus was well worth the wait. While 2021 seemed like effortless fine wine, sleek, precise, tensile and mineral for days, and 2022 exceeded every expectation for a warm year with charming and substantial density and remains criminally underrated, the 2023 takes a little from both and adds a dash of 2020’s upfront charm—most notably in Benn and Morstein.
Across much of Europe, 2023 continues to arrive warm on paper but pure and elegantly generous in the glass without any sacrifice of nerve. I’m starting to take a strange comfort that while climate change will keep everyone on their toes and biting their nails, the adaptation of the grower and perhaps even nature itself is finding a circuitous way to the finish line with terroir and craft integrity intact. And if the fruit that survives the seasonal gantlet can still find the kind of clarity of a year like 2023, this kind of pleasure, at a minimal cost to how long it will last in the cellar, we can accept that, despite every season, growers will weave through the asteroid field and achieve some level of success with whatever remains on the vine in good health. We just have to make sure they’re supported with what wines they do put to bottle so we can help preserve their family livelihood and regional wine culture.
The irony is that after analyzing Wechsler’s 2023 crus over three days of pure wine brilliance and endless inertia from one day to the next, they are exactly the sort that make me think about old bottles. They already possess enough depth, enough intrigue, and enough sense of place that it’s impossible not to wonder where they’ll be twenty years from now.
One lingering question, however, is whether these warmer, more immediately giving vintages will inspire the same confidence in long-term cellaring that so many of the cooler and more typical vintages once did. Perhaps they will. Perhaps they won’t. But what interests me even more is whether longevity is given the attention it deserves anymore as an integral part of wine appreciation.
Societally, we’ve perhaps never focused on longevity more than we do today. We celebrate athletes who redefine the limits of age, artists and musicians whose careers span generations, scientists, writers, and winegrowers whose wisdom continues to deepen well into their later years. The age at which we expect people to slow down seems to creep higher every decade, including retirement. And yet, in the wine world, we’ve probably never been less willing to wait for the very thing we seem to value the most. Most bottles are consumed within a few years of purchase. Even among collectors, the opportunities to drink truly mature wines often arrive as comparative tastings, verticals, or professional exercises rather than as a single bottle shared slowly over the course of an evening with the right number of people who can truly receive the message in the bottle. There’s irony here: a bottle that has spent decades becoming itself is far too often exhausted by unnecessary decanting, then poured into dozens of glasses, analyzed by a mere ounce in a short window of time, compared against its peers, and gone before anyone has had the chance to tell its story. In our pursuit of understanding great old wines, many have forgotten how to enjoy them.
And yet many restaurant buyers continue to gravitate toward wines built for the long haul. We admire wines that promise twenty or thirty years of evolution more than those whose greatest pleasures lie in their youth, even if many of us intend to drink them long before they arrive at their peak. We’ve preserved the ideal of longevity while quietly abandoning the practice of it. Perhaps the question is no longer whether wines should be designed for extensive aging, but whether we’ve forgotten why generations of wine lovers believed they should.
Experiencing a well-aged wine is a must to fully understand younger wines and the depths of a wine’s potential, though not all are meant for aging. The complexity imposed by a slow, controlled degradation imparts layer upon layer of subtle complexity while shedding youthful weight. It’s distilled to its truth for a short time before becoming the earth again after it’s no longer palatable—the human experience! We often speak of aging as if it were simply the slow march toward decline, but perhaps that’s being too focused on the end rather than the unique journey in between. There is a period, whether in wine, food, or the human experience, where individual components that once demanded attention slowly weave into something far more harmonious.
If the overwhelming majority of bottles will be enjoyed within a few years of release anyway, why have we come to place so much value on how they’ll taste decades from now?
I have long stockpiled old wines because I view wine that has aged successfully as wine’s deepest space—a liquid time capsule into anthropology’s recent past, earth’s geology, the earth’s connection to the universal influences at the time of birth, and how the alchemy that began in the cellar after harvest continues to evolve after the grapes were reborn into something else entirely.
I think that one of the marvels of aged wine is that as we age too, we more easily relate to it. They’re nostalgic in a way, like seeing a friend you haven’t seen in decades who came for dinner. Sure, they’ve got more grays and aren’t in top physical form. But the conversation might be more fully engaged, contemplative, richer, and deeper because it will be a sharing of life experiences as more experienced and, hopefully, wiser people. In the best case, it may result in months of thought-provoking self-examination of our expectations for our own lives, our missteps, our difficulties and tragedies, and our glories based on the encounter with this old friend—this old wine.
When I was younger, older wines were an exploration of aromatic compounds I’d never smelled before, or those that brought me back to some strange, nearly forgotten childhood memory—like falling asleep face down in my mom’s 1976 Ford LTD with my nose buried in its crusty vinyl seats. Young wines can do this too, but their vigorously youthful aromatics are simpler and keep much of their complexity behind the curtain. Now that I’ve spent years walking the vineyards of the growers and wines we represent, old bottles from those places don’t smell unfamiliar so much as they smell like somewhere I’ve actually been before. The wild herbs and flowers between the rows, the smell of rain on hot granite on a warm and dry summer day in southern Saint-Joseph, puddles in Puligny-Montrachet clay after a winter rain, the particular scent of one valley or one day compared to another, even the regional foods shared around a grower’s table, the smell of its fading varnish, or the burning of the dried canes lit for the grill somehow find their way back into the glass so far away from that actual moment. I may not recall consciously noticing many of those things at the time, yet somehow my senses collected them, and years later quietly returned them to me inside the glass. We’re always seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and feeling the world around us, yet only a small fraction ever rises into conscious thought. Perhaps that’s why certain places, certain people, and certain wines can awaken something that never felt like a memory until the moment it returned. Old wine doesn’t just tell its own story. It can remind you of things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.
But the true marvel of old wine is its sort of psychedelic effect: it can bring your subconscious into consciousness.
Katharina makes Pinot Noir too! Arriving Spring 2027. Photo courtesy of Katharina
The first five lives
Kat grew up in a grape-growing environment and watched her parents stress out when they were hit by each year’s challenges, which were dominated by crop losses to unfavorable weather. Wine consumption was absent in the family’s daily life, and Katharina and her siblings had little interest in continuing the family business that had begun in the eighteenth century.
During her French Literature studies at university in Paris, followed by Social and Political Sciences in Stuttgart and then work as a Junior Editor in Berlin for a German television station, she started to feel the pull to go home.
Upon her return, she met many young winemakers and began to understand the lifestyle differences between bulk wine grape growers like her parents and growers who bottled their own wines. The latter, often in a passionate pursuit of excellence, always had a greater interaction with the outside world. She began to see a meditative life of work with her hands and her mind in the vineyards and the cellar balanced with cultural experiences by way of world travel, food, wine, and access to everything from every corner of the globe—a privileged life connected to the rest of the world from her small German village of Westhofen.
2009 would be her first season back at home, and she attended winemaking school in Oppenheim at the same time. Before she got her enology and viticulture degree in 2012, she worked harvests for Weingut Gutzler in 2010, and the following year for Germany’s rarely disputed dry Riesling king in the next village, Klaus-Peter Keller. Katharina explains that Keller taught her about finesse in limestone-driven white wines, and the importance of trinkfreude, the “joy to drink.”
Due Credit
With all of today’s fuss about the Rheinhessen’s extraordinary dry Rieslings, there is no greater irony than the region’s historical reputation of bulk wine production and of the poorest quality in all of Germany since the great wars. To now be at the top of the heap for dry German Riesling, gratitude is owed to the extraordinary vision, research, and craftsmanship of mainly the Keller and Wittmann families. Their impact continues to ripple through the industry, inspiring the arrival and rebirth of many new and exciting wineries along this curious and unique strip of limestone, including that of the young Katharina Wechsler.
Kat’s Way
Years away from her immersion in the bustle of Paris, with its immense history, passing the days with French poetry and literature followed by the excitement of television in Berlin, brought Katharina to engage with wine differently, to approach it with eyes wide open to the wider world. Everything began to click; the dreamer’s dream was alive. A romantic life in agriculture could be achieved. To spend time with Katharina and her multi-talented partner, Manu, now is a feast of ambiance, conversation, food, and, of course, wine; but wine is not the main event, rather a stimulant for a more open encounter. Wine without ambiance means less, and she sets the stage for each moment—to show how she likes to enjoy it.
Kat on 2023
“Vegetation started quite late in 2023. We had a later bud break and already quite a lot of rain during the early summer. At the end of July, it became rainy again and quite cold for the time of year. I remember it quite well because it was the year we got married.
The first week of August was also a bit rainy, but by the end of August we had much warmer temperatures together with more rain. As a result, vegetation and ripening accelerated. We saw a drop in acidity because of the warm nights, so the malic acid declined quite quickly. By the middle of September, we still had a very decent level of acidity.
We started picking Riesling for Kabinett around the 10th of September, and we finished the harvest with Kirchspiel on the 29th of September. Sugar levels in general were quite moderate, and we didn’t reach more than 91° Oechsle–roughly 21.8° Brix and approximately 12.6–13.0% ABV.
Overall, I would describe 2023 as a very balanced vintage. It’s not so much on the fruity side, but more on the mineral side, with very balanced acidity. I would describe it as a blend of 2021 and perhaps the warmer vintages like 2022. It’s definitely more classic, with more restrained fruit that’s not too loud. I think it’s a vintage that will become very interesting over the long term.
As for the wines themselves, 2023 was also the first year we harvested fruit from the Benn vineyard after the green grafting. It was the first vintage where we used that Riesling for our single-vineyard Benn. It was also the first year we included the small Kirchspiel parcel that we call Schweißtröpfchen in our dry Kirchspiel. That changed the style a little, making the Kirchspiel more mineral and a bit saltier.”
Manu, Winter of 2024
The Sky
Rheinhessen is considered a continental/Mediterranean climate, and this, of course, means relatively hot summers and extremely cold winters for a wine region. The surrounding hills are low and are referred to as the Alzeyer Hügelland (translating to the low hills of Alzey). They rise to no higher than 350 meters, with Westhofen at 120m, and Katharina’s highest vineyard, Morstein, starting around 180m and peaking at a little over 220m. In Westhofen, Katharina has witnessed winter temperatures as low as -17°C (1°F) and summers as hot as 42°C (108°F), though that peak may have been surpassed this year. The harvest season diurnal range can be between a 12°C-25°C shift from day to night. Annual precipitation is around 700mm/yr (27.5 inches), and peak summertime daylight on June 21 is a whopping sixteen hours and eighteen minutes. The Rheinhessen vineyards receive as much direct summer sunlight as any wine region in the world due to its open exposure and far northern location.
Typical limestones of this area of Rheinhessen
The Earth
Limestone may be responsible for the world’s most recognizable and dominant European wines of the last century. Before all the geological hubbub and the influence of rock types on their resulting wines, the global market was already unknowingly selecting wine by their influences. Think about Europe’s most dominant fine wine categories of the fifty years that came before the last two decades: In France, the Loire Valley with Sancerre and many of the famous Chenin Blanc terroirs, Champagne, Chablis, Côte d’Or and the rest of Burgundy, Châteauneuf-du-Pape and all its Southern Rhône satellite appellations, the eastern side of Bordeaux; Italy’s Barolo, Barbaresco, Chianti and Chianti Classico, Brunello di Montalcino, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and the Veneto; Spain’s Rioja and Ribera del Duero. Limestone often imparts a broader palate sensation to its wines (as do some volcanic rock types). In contrast, other bedrock types, like igneous and metamorphic, tend to have sharper or more rigid textural lines.
If limestone is Westhofen’s Batman, loess is its Robin. These wind-blown, silt-sized loess particles (referred to here as aeolian silt) created by the glacial grinding of rock during the recent ice ages into a fine enough grain to be first transported by river then swept up into the sky and deposited on hillsides. Here, the loess is rich in calcium carbonate, due to the grinding of limestone rocks in the Alps. The water-retention capacity and nutrient richness of loess, in addition to limestone, are also major contributing factors that help ameliorate the dehydrating beatdown of the summer sun.
The Vector
Between the sky and the earth lies the vector: the vine, the vineyard, the hand, the mind, and finally the wine that channels both earth and sky.
When asked how her vineyards differ from others in the area (even those of growers who’ve been working organically or biodynamically for some time), Katharina says that hers are a little freer to grow as they want and need to grow, rather than being perfectly tidy and rigidly sculpted. Each vine’s growth is based on individual needs, and maintaining uniformity may make it easier for the grower, without benefitting the plant.
Benn, the family’s tiny monopole vineyard site inside the region, has perhaps the most diverse plantations of all her vineyard parcels. It’s her largest vineyard section and has the greatest variation of bedrock, topsoil and grape varieties. The warmest of Katharina’s three important crus, it’s composed mostly of loess topsoil in the lower parts that sit as low as 120m, and limestone in the upper part, peaking around 160m. Quality Riesling thrives when it suffers–when it has to work hard for nutrients and water, which is why it is in the lower sections where most of the non-Riesling vines are planted. Its 50-year-old Riesling vines, particularly those used for Wechsler’s top-flight trocken bottling, are planted in limestone bedrock and limestone and loess topsoil toward the top, not too far away from the bottom of Morstein.
The quality of Riesling from Benn is noteworthy, but there’s no doubt that its current highs compared to Grosses Gewächs crus (while it isn’t classified as a GG wine, nor is Katharina in the VDP) are not yet the same level as Kirchspiel and Morstein. Katharina is still discovering Benn, and while she had very successful showings in the previous two vintages, 2023 seems to be a substantial breakthrough. The material for potential greatness is unquestionably in the cards. Before the beguiling and open-knit 2023, it often needed a little more time open and perhaps more cellar aging too, to fully express itself with a level similar to Kirchspiel and Morstein.
Katharina’s Kirchspiel Riesling trocken always screams its Grand Cru status (Grosses Gewächs) upon opening. Shaped like an amphitheater facing the Rhine River with a southeastern exposure and an average gradient of around 30 percent, its bedrock and topsoil are composed of clay marls, limestone and a lot of loess. Katharina has three different parcels in this large vineyard with reasonably good separation, giving the resulting wines a broader range of complexity and greater balance. Kirchspiel is a leader in the range of all growers who have Riesling vines in this gifted terroir, and it’s considered one of the country’s great dry Riesling sites. The young vines of her three Kirchspiel vineyards also compose the entirety of the Riesling trocken ‘Kalk,’ making this one of the great deals in the entire appellation–same idea as Keller’s Von der Fels, same as Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé’s declassified younger-vine Musigny into their Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru bottling.
Morstein, Rheinhessen’s juggernaut chalky limestone-based, dry Riesling vineyard is—even with vines only replanted in 2012—the undisputed big boy in Katharina’s dry Riesling range. Katharina’s Morstein vines are massale selections from the Mosel and have smaller, looser clusters with naturally low yields, even from the young vines. A mere pup by the standard of vine age, Morstein is formidable. And while it’s not as flashy out of the gates, it picks up serious power and expansive complexities that seem to know no end. Morstein faces south and rises to a high plateau of around 240m with a 20% gradient, all on limestone bedrock. Its root penetration into the subsoil is also a more difficult challenge, giving the vines the much-needed stress to deliver consistent peak performance.
The 2023 Crus | Benn, Kirchspiel, Morstein
I examined Katharina’s three cru Rieslings over three days of repeated tastings, and as time passed, they deepened in complexity and nuance. By the final day and the last pours, they hadn’t stopped climbing. The first hour of the first day, they were tight—perhaps too cold from a quick chill in the freezer. They showed their breed, but they were snug into the first three or four ounces. The second day they increased on all levels with warmth and welcome. On the third day they were all shining like a harvest sunset. To take the last tastes on the third day seemed premature, and I am sure they would’ve held their lines for at least a full week without weakening.
The three Riesling crus fascinate because they don’t simply move from lesser to greater. They move through different expressions of the same place, like watching different physiques or personalities develop from the same basic genetic material. Benn is much more light-framed than Kirchspiel and Morstein. On day three, Benn’s charm was at a three-day high with Riesling flowers that sit somewhere between Mosel and Pfalz, beautifully mineral, with a frame like a young, lean super athlete. It doesn’t have the weight of a big wine. If I were to use a Côte d’Or model, it would be a high-altitude, thin, rocky style Burgundy terroir—lean, tensile, elegant. The fruit is beautifully sun-touched, like a warm dawn rising over a cold ocean rather than under full sunlight, and rich in a very ethereal way. The texture is fine, and this is undoubtedly the best Benn I’ve tasted. A gentle spiciness draws me back, and greedily back again—sweet Meyer lemon with a suggestion of lemon curd. Benn is simply an effortlessly charming wine, and when the cork is pulled, it’s hard not to just get after it and persist until it’s exhausted.
Kirchspiel immediately moves in another direction. It’s all texture all the time—more body, more layers, slowly unfolding. It’s been richly phenolic since the first pour, and that continues through the final taste on the third day. I wouldn’t say the phenolics come across as forced, but compared with Morstein they seem more intentional somehow, as though Kat wanted a little more weight and perhaps used a firmer or longer press cycle. She confirmed that to be untrue, but that’s how this bottle drinks in mid-July 2026. She did mention, however, that it comes from older vine parcels with smaller grapes, which could have led to more phenolic density. And she did say that it has more fruit from the Schweißtröpfchen parcel of the three she has in Kirchspiel, “making it more mineral and a bit saltier.” It indeed has much more of a wet wool Riesling character, even a slight petroleum note on the back palate that I don’t normally associate with this cru in its youth.
Unquestionably more powerful than Benn, Kirchspiel’s body is more hulking and less sculpted at this point—not a default or criticism, just a stage of this Grand Cru this year. Benn is gem-cut. Kirchspiel also feels like it’s still becoming itself. It’s attractively bitter, and the phenolic grip is persistent, savory, and gastronomic rather than severe. Of the three, Kirchspiel almost demands more substantial food instead of lighter fare. Benn has its own bitterness, but because it is gentler, it can more easily be drunk by itself, by yourself. Kirchspiel should join you and company for dinner. What’s also interesting is that Kirchspiel is actually less aromatic than it struck me in the past. The core of fruit comfortably stays in the background as gentle white fruits melt into white flowers that decorate its fiercely mineral body. Its mineral texture is dense, more interior, broader, more girthy. The precision isn’t so much in the aromatics as it is in the palate.
Despite coming from younger vines, Morstein has a denser yet much more elegant core. Kirchspiel is a sculpture whose rough form has already been hewn from the rock, but whose finer contours will slowly emerge in the coming months and years. Morstein is already statuesque: clean and precise lines, decisive, and polished. There’s also more generosity through the middle of the wine, more sucrosity. The phenolic profile is completely different: no strong phenolic Kirchspiel edge—softer, almost analog in texture and much chalkier. The phenolic finesse of Morstein is chalkier and gently palate-staining, preserving its fine finish for a long time. Morstein is again white fruit and white flowers, but sweeter and more open. Kirchspiel feels like a very muscular body bent over that’s only beginning to stand upright; Morstein stands as though fully sculpted, every proportion resolved and every line in balance.
Out of curiosity, I poked around the net for what reviewers said about Katharina’s 2023s. James Suckling’s reviews were very flattering, and deservedly so. They scored Morstein only a point or two ahead of Kirchspiel, but after following these bottles for three days, the gap feels much larger to me as of now. Morstein has been the champion from the sounding of the starting whistle; relentless, tactically perfect—Spain in the recent World Cup final. Benn is immediately more superficially attractive, but Morstein communicates its Grand Cru personality without hesitation. Nothing about it appears overworked in the cellar. It simply seems like the wine naturally arrived at this point. Even its minerality is different. Kirchspiel is driven by austerity at the front of the palate, while Morstein finishes with a gentle, almost sour mineral lift on the back palate that keeps the wine fresh without ever becoming hard.
Taken together, this is an impressive collection, and the geology seems to come through in a very particular way. These limestone soils don’t give me the feeling of compact, impenetrable rock like the Côte d’Or or the harder Cretaceous limestones farther south in France. Nor do they remind me of exposed Loire tuffeau, or Champagne chalk. Instead, especially in Morstein, and perhaps even more in Benn, the limestone influence feels softer, more open, more chalk-like, allowing roots to wander rather than force themselves through fractures. That texture seems present in the wines themselves: nourished and healthy, not overly stressed. Morstein doesn’t behave like a wine grown in hard rock soil, but rather one from chalk—something gentler that gives shape without severity. That softness, that generosity, seems to define Kat’s entire range of 2023 Rieslings.
