Sybille Kuntz "Qualitätswein" Trocken 2023

Sybille Kuntz "Qualitätswein" (“quality wine”) Trocken is a delicious dry Mosel Riesling which has an action-packed palate of crisp green fruit, lime, apricot and floral notes. It’s as fresh as a daisy and a delight to drink. The grapes come from the estate’s younger vineyards, up to 40 years old, located around Lieser and Kues, just 1,000 meters from the Mosel River near the town of Bernkastel. They are picked during the first two weeks of harvest and vinified dry. This wine represents tremendous value.

Sybille Kuntz took over the running of her family vineyards in 1981. She had left her hometown of Lieser to study business administration in Wuppertal, a town about forty miles north of Cologne and whilst there opened a wine shop to help fund her studies. The shop was a success and sold a vast array of German wines, but Sybille felt disappointed by many of the wines and felt she could do better.

She is a lady with high standards, and this can be seen in her meticulous attention to detail in the vineyards and the wines. The 20-hectare estate is farmed biodynamically with the aid of her husband, Markus, who shares the same passion and love for the Riesling grape as his wife.

The jewel in the Kuntz’s crown is their large parcels of vineyards in the Grand Cru of Niederberg-Helden, which sits above the town of Lieser on a 70-degree slope. These vines, planted in the 1920s, get amazing amounts of sunshine due to their exposure and benefit from additional sunlight which reflects off the Mosel River with mirror-like intensity.

German wine labels can be confusing, but Sybille has done everything possible to make the wines easy to understand. Her wines are fermented dry with an alcohol content of around 12% ABV. They are bottled by style rather than by vineyard, so the range is smaller than other producers. They are easily identifiable by their label colours which are modern and like something from a Fallow & Ball catalogue.