Urziger Wurzgarten Riesling GG
⏳ Drinking Window
2024 - 2038
🍽️ Food & Wine Pairings
Spicy Thai or Vietnamese cuisine, roasted pork belly with five-spice, and seared sea scallops with ginger-infused sauces.
✨ Technical Specifications
The Urziger Wurzgarten, or 'spice garden of Urzig,' is one of the Mosel's most dramatic and legendary vineyards. Rising like a sheer amphitheater of red volcanic, iron-rich slate—a striking geological anomaly in a region dominated by blue slate—this vineyard yields Rieslings of singular intensity. Dr. Ernst Loosen crafts this Grosses Gewachs (GG) from extremely old, ungrafted vines, some exceeding a century in age. Fermented with indigenous yeasts in traditional 1,000-liter oak Fuder casks and aged on the lees, this dry Riesling beautifully marries the vineyard's signature exotic, wild-herb spiciness with opulent tropical fruit notes and a fiery, mineral-driven acidity.
🍾 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.