Willi Schaefer

At just four hectares in size, the Schaefers epitomise the life of the true vigneron, experiencing every inch of the vagaries of a marginal climate, knowing that losses will be felt acutely. Each year they seem to face down that challenge – eyes open to risk and reward – with an optimism that is presumably a pre-requisite to sanity. Or perhaps it’s more that smiles and Riesling simply flow in the blood. Remarkably, Christoph Schaefer can trace his family roots back in the very same village of Graach over more than five hundred years. Despite that, and despite making some of the world’s greatest Riesling, this charming family have their feet firmly on their fractured slate soils, across the more than 100 micro-parcels they farm over three sites: Graacher Himmelreich (2ha), Graacher Domprobst (2ha) and Wehlener Sonnenuhr (0.5ha). Schaefer produces some of the Mosel’s most intense and powerful wines from the Himmelreich and Domprobst vineyards. The latter vineyard has particularly diverse soil types so several parcels tend to be vinified and bottled separately as different Fuder numbers. The wines are all aged and fermented in large oak fuders and usually bottled by the May following the vintage. These are taut, powerful and complex, some of Germany's finest and most mineral wines.

2023 Vintage: “2023 was a challenging year but we are happy with how the quality played out. We skipped the village level wines as we felt the ripeness was too good, so jumped straight to Kabinett, and this is the heart of the vintage. Harvest ran over four weeks, starting on the day of the auction in September, with a warm start that allowed “us to approach it in a topsy-turvy way: going for the coolest sites first to bank that freshness, waiting for the warmer sites to develop even more beautiful fruit. In the end, we still had some water during the harvest so the higher concentrations did not always turn out better and in fact could turn quite quickly. We are a small team and to manage that required a lot of negative selections in the bunches, so we felt it better to bank the best Kabinett we could plus a small amount of beautiful Spätlesen.” They see 2023 as having the raciness of 2021 and the fruit of 2022. A miniscule 200 litres of Auslese Nr. 14 were bottled in halves for the market. Ultimately, Willi Schaefer is one of the rare estates where buying blindly is going to land a hit.