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Blick auf alten Ayler Neuen

German wine is confusing - what can we say? Let's try to simplify a touch...

A Gold Capsule for a wine is sort of like getting a "gold star" back in grade school.

German winemakers give these only to certain bottlings they think are very special.

See, in Germany, a number of different wines are often made from the same vineyard. Technically, the only way to legally differentiate wines from the same vineyard is by the AP number - it's like the social security number every wine gets. It's why, for example, you'll see a Graacher Domprobst Spätlese #12 and a Graacher Domprobst Spätlese #5 from a producer like Willi Schaefer. The #12 and #5 are the AP numbers.

But if a producer feels a certain bottling is very special, he/she can also give the wine a "Gold Capsule" - literally. In German, the word is "Kapsul," so you'll often see this abbreviated to "GK."

GKs usually have higher levels of ripeness and are both more expensive and much rarer than their normal counterparts.

The Palmberg Terrassen is a completely unknown, roughly 5-hectare vineyard that is more than farmed by the Stein family; it is loved by the family. There's a devotion here, a connection to the land that is humbling. Ulli Stein's 87-year-old father has been making wine here since the early 1960s and he still visits the site almost daily, tending to his vines and drinking the wines of the vineyard as often as he can. Ulli Stein's 2008 Palmberg-Terrassen is dense and saturating, darn-near glossy with extract - lime zest, razor-sharp citrus, wild green herbs. The 2008 Stein Palmberg-Terrassen is likely the greatest Riesling value on earth.

Click the button below to see our real-time online inventory of Stein's 2008 St. Aldegunder Palmberg Terrassen Spatlese Trocken:

Roses dot the vineyard here and small sheds provide respite. Due to the severity of the incline, obviously working this site is extremely difficult and tiring. Many acres of the site have gone fallow, overrun by the wilderness. At this point, to the best of our knowledge, the Steins are the only serious producers within the vineyard, farming 1.3 hectares of the site and producing a scant 2 Füders worth of juice - that's only about 230 cases. The 2007 is THE FIRST bottling to be imported into the U.S.!

The shrine that Ulli Stein's father built within the vineyard. To this day, at 87-years-old, Herr Stein still visits his vineyard almost daily. In this picture you also see the "Terrassen," or terraces, that largely define the landscape of the Lower Mosel.

Here you get a real sense of just how very steep this vineyard is.

Another, slightly more panoramic view of the Palmberg-Terrassen vineyard.

Click the button below to see our real-time online inventory of Stein's 2008 St. Aldegunder Palmberg Terrassen Spatlese Trocken:

So I started out with every intention of writing the piece on Keller to end all pieces on Keller.

Truth be told, I had spent quite a few days writing. I’d even bothered Klaus-Peter Keller with a bunch of questions (and, of all the nerve, while he was harvesting his Pinot Noir). It was going ok I’d say – not A+ but solid B. Then Joe reminded me that John Gilman had written a piece on Weingut Keller last year in his newsletter View from the Cellar. I had totally forgotten.

I think I was on page five by the time I realized this was the piece on Keller to end all pieces on Keller and I was wasting my damn time.

Philipp Wittmann took the helm of his family's estate in 1999 and it is without a doubt one of the most impressive estates in the Rheinhessen. Strangely, while Wittmann has a monster reputation in Germany, they are all but unknown in America. They are, like Klaus-Peter Keller, dry Riesling specialists - 90% of their production, in fact, is dry Riesling. Here Philipp Wittmann stands in one of the cellars of the estate. As you can tell, old wooden casks are used widely.

Weingut Knebel is situated in what is considered the Lower Mosel's best village, Winningen. It is also happens to be one of the warmest areas in the Mosel and therefore the style at Knebel (especially for the dry wines) is muscular and powerful, while (almost miraculously) elegant.

Knebel's dry wines are made by Gernot Kollman, the former winemaker at Van Volxem. The noble sweet wines, also held in the highest regard, are made by Beatte Knebel. Gernot works in a hands-off manner with indigenous yeasts while also using ambitious methods to extract profound aromatics and concentration from the grapes: pre-fermentation oxidation, extended skin contact and high fermentation temperatures.

The steeply terraced and visually stunning vineyards of the Lower Mosel don't offer an easy life to those who tend them. They are laborious and costly to work and their obscurity means the grapes they produce often fetch a low price.

More work, less pay. This cruel formula often results in two contrasting issues - one good, one bad.

What can I say, I LOVE Austrian wine. Just such a whacky lineup of really profound, kooky wines, everything showing great. We were hosted by Wolfgang and Eddie at Seasonal, a new Austrian restaurant on 58th Street in Midtown that deserves some serious attention. Sophisticated, pure food with contrasting yet integrated flavors. Really worth visiting NYCers - I can't say enough good things about this restaurant.

We had a lot of wines, but I'm only posting on a few because I'm lazy and I didn't take good enough notes and honestly the great wines were just so, so compelling that they sort of overwhelmed the just plain old good wines.

Joe and I were pretty excited to host a dinner last Sunday at Hearth in NYC starring none other than Van Volxem's owner: Roman Niewodniczanski. Pretty much everything you've heard about him is true. He is very tall and he is very opinionated. He's not shy. And he's also making some of the most serious dry Rieslings in the Saar Valley. As an heir to the Bitburger beer fortune he's applied a "spare no expense" philosophy to his estate: Manic vineyard work, crazy-low yields sourced from some of the top sites of the Saar: Scharzhofberger, Altenberg and Gottesfuss to name a few. This was the first tasting of his 2007 single-vineyard wines, so it was sort of a treat to be the first in the U.S. to taste these dry Rieslings.