The Nahe's Emrich-Schönleber, alongside Keller, Dönnhoff, and Schäfer-Fröhlich, comprise Germany's most noble estates in the Grosses Gewächs realm, where the country's best dry Rieslings are found.

Halenberg is a towering wine built for the cellar. While Fruhlingsplatzchen, from red slate and clay soils, offers more immediate charm, Halenberg, deriving from blue slate soils, is more reserved upon release. With time, in cellar or decanter, notes of crisp green apple, candied lime, and peppermint emerge. Halenberg stands apart from other GGs with its saturating, deep mineral expression on the palate, with many layers unfolding when given patience.

Importer (and my long-time Riesling guru) Stephen Bitterolf of Vom Boden highlights where Emrich-Schönleber lands stylistically: "They are neither as baroque and lavish as Dönnhoff, nor as fiercely angular as Schäfer-Fröhlich... In fact, for me, stylistically, you would have to leave the Nahe altogether to find the wines that remind me the most of Emrich-Schönleber, and that would be Keller in the Rheinhessen."

Led today by Frank Emrich, this family began growing Riesling on the treacherously steep slopes along the Nahe river in the mid-1700s. In the 1960s, they began to focus entirely on viticulture and winemaking (Before then, it was a risky proposition to have their livelihood be at the will of nature so directly). Over the next two decades, the estate steadily grew to ten hectares.

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