Product Description:

"Founded in 1830, Weingut Peter Lauer is run today by siblings Katharina and Florian Lauer. Few winemakers have the same historical awareness and bring more thought to their vineyards and wines than Florian Lauer. The 11-hectare estate includes holdings in the Ayler Kupp, Lambertskirch and Schonfels, as well as in the Schodener Feils. Work in the vineyard is exacting, as are the crucial decisions of harvest dates and stringent selection.

In the cellar, Florian Lauer says he makes Kabinett as though it was a Champagne base wine: “Only the first press fraction is used to make it as fine and elegant as possible. Producing a mediocre Kabinett is easy; you harvest fruit and stop fermentation at 45g/L of sweetness. But teasing out the required elegance is much harder than making a rich Spätlese.”

The Ayler Kupp Kabinett, for instance, is a very stringent, early pre-selection of the parcels destined for the GG, harvested as soon as the grapes are no longer underripe but not yet super-ripe, either. Lauer’s dry wines receive a lot of lees-stirring, lending textural richness and countering the acidic precision.

Sweetness/dryness levels are indicated on Lauer’s front labels as small capital letters. T stands for trocken which here means up to 6g/L of residual sugar. Indeed, when set against a higher acidity, it tastes properly dry. TF stands for trocken bis feinherb and denotes wines pitched between dry and off-dry. F stands for feinherb, a term not defined by law but absolutely suited to the off-dry nature of these wines. My visit in April 2023 was too late to taste the full range of 2021s.

However, I was lucky to be among the first to taste a range of TBAs from the hot and dry 2018 vintage. It had produced some super-rich TBAs – not necessarily from noble rot, but from passerillage as the year was so dry. With sugar levels around 390-400g/L, these wines fermented so slowly that it took them a long time to reach the 5.5% ABV threshold that qualified them as wines. Two of them are outstanding and monuments to Lauer’s sites. TBAs are rarities at this estate. Lauer notes that the only recent vintages where TBAs were produced were 2005, 2009, 2011 and 2018." - Vinous