Peter Lauer Ayler Senior Fass 6 Riesling 2024

Peter Lauer Ayler Senior Fass 6 Riesling 2024

The Lauer family estate, founded in 1830, is located in Ayl, a small village on the west side of the Saar River. The estate is planted exclusively to Riesling; some parcels are around a century old. The great majority of wines are sourced from the famed Ayler Kupp. The style here from Florian Lauer is quite the opposite of his famous Saar neighbours, Egon Müller and Hanno Zilliken – focusing on dry and off-dry Rieslings bottled from single sites, identified by their  cask number, as opposed to the Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese  wines of the latter two made using the German Prädikat System. Yet the hallmarks are similar: purity, precision, intensity, minerality.

The wine is called “Senior” as a tribute to Florian’s grandfather who was already in the 1950s famous at least in the Saar Valley for his dry Riesling. So the story goes, he would walk through the cellar and taste all the barrels and then write “Senior” on the cask he wanted for his own drinking. Nine times out of ten, the cask he took was good ole “Fass, or barrel, #6,” sourced from parcels in the western-most part of the Kupp (to the left of the Kern site if you look at the Lauer Grand Cru map, available in the gallery to the left). This is one of the cooler parcels, farthest away from the moderating influence of the Saar River. As it happens, this wine nearly always ferments to a precarious, near-impossible-to-describe balance, in this gray area that is not at all sweet, but not legally dry either. 

The N°6 “Senior” Ayl, as it is referred to on the front label (the reference to the vintage is left for the back label), is a just off-dry wine (with 8 g/l of residual sugar) made from fruit harvested from the original Kupp hill on a west-facing section towards Wawern. It offers an impressive and already nicely complex nose of fine herbs, spices, herbal, smoky (bacon), green paper, and woodruff. The wine proves light yet fresh on the palate, yet it also has good intense and length. The aftertaste is already dry-tasting and very light. This is a very good Senior N° 6. - Mosel Fine Wines