Peter Lauer "Senior" Fass 6 Riesling '23

While Peter Lauer considers this a village-level wine (any Lauer bottle with a green circle on it is considered a village-level wine), the “Senior” bottling is a single-vineyard wine, sourced entirely from the grand cru vineyard of Kupp. These vines in the Kupp vineyard have an average age of around 70 years and many are ungrafted. 

The wine is called “Senior” as a tribute to Florian’s grandfather, a winemaker celebrated for his Saar Valley dry Riesling as far back as the 1950s. As the story goes, he would walk through the cellar and taste all the barrels, then write “Senior” on the cask he wanted for his own drinking. Nine times out of ten, the cask he took was “Fass,” or barrel number 6, sourced from parcels in the westernmost area of the Kupp vineyard. It is one of the cooler parcels, farthest from the moderating influence of the Saar River. It is a wine that typically ferments to a level that is not sweet but not legally dry either, sometimes described “dry tasting.” In the old days, “dry” Saar wines often needed a bit of residual sugar, not to make them taste fruity but to counter the high acidities. “Senior” is named after not only Florian’s grandfather but a style of wine that used to be more common for the Saar. The 2023 “Senior” is a dry wine, with only ten grams of residual sugar).