Erdener Treppchen Riesling Spatlese
⏳ Drinking Window
2024 - 2040
🍽️ Food & Wine Pairings
Spicy Thai or Sichuan cuisine, roasted pork belly with apple compote, and strong, salty cheeses like Roquefort or aged Gouda.
✨ Technical Specifications
The Erdener Treppchen, or 'little staircase of Erden,' is one of the Mosel's most legendary vineyards, named for the stone steps carved directly into the sheer cliffside to help workers navigate its dizzying slopes. Under the stewardship of Ernst Loosen, this site produces a benchmark Riesling Spätlese. The vineyard's unique, iron-rich red slate soil imparts a distinctively muscular, spicy minerality to the wine, contrasting with the blue slate found elsewhere in the region. Crafted from 100% Riesling, this late-harvest wine is fermented cool in traditional oak Fuder casks and stainless steel. It beautifully balances luscious natural sweetness with the Mosel's trademark electric acidity, offering vibrant notes of white peach, apricot, and a lingering, stony finish.
🍾 About the Producer
Weingut Dr. Loosen stands as one of the preeminent global ambassadors of Germany's Mittelmosel. Under family ownership for more than two centuries, the estate experienced an epochal renaissance after Ernst 'Erni' Loosen assumed leadership in 1988. Loosen immediately implemented draconian yield restrictions, prohibited chemical fertilizers, and embraced spontaneous fermentations in neutral oak Fuder casks, frequently practicing extended lees contact. The domaine's strength rests in its holdings of ancient, ungrafted vines—many over a century old—clinging to perilous, south-facing slate amphitheaters. These steep slopes span blue Devonian slate in the Wehlener Sonnenuhr, red volcanic-slate colluvium in the Ürziger Würzgarten, and heat-retaining cliffs in the Erdener Prälat. Dr. Loosen is renowned both for crystalline, classically delicate Prädikat expressions defined by buoyant acidity and low alcohol, and for benchmark dry Grosses Gewächs bottlings that celebrate age-worthy, mineral-driven tension.
🍇 Grapes
100% Riesling