Tasting note
- Colour & appearance
- Medium, clear straw yellow, which appears remarkably transparent despite the absence of filtration.
- Nose
- A bouquet of rare, straightforward clarity: yellow and red apple, pear and quince, accompanied by white blossoms. A herbal tincture that faintly recalls Chartreuse hovers above – without its weight, rather cool and lively, finely structured rather than voluminous.
- Palate
- The white-fleshed fruit meets a round, ripe acidity that allows the wine to glide across the tongue. A fine phenolic texture lends structure and a gentle pull, whilst the yellow spiciness so typical of Silvaner, together with herbs, occupies the mid-palate. Bone-dry, slender, and at eleven per cent alcohol by volume, of an almost ascetic presence.
- Finish
- Long and juicy, carried by a vibrant acidity that never wanes in this northern marginal vineyard site.
- Terroir & origin
- The vines are rooted in the Thuringian single vineyard site Kaatschener Dachsberg, high above the Saale river, on weathered shell limestone with portions of loess clay. Saale-Unstrut is Germany’s northernmost quality wine region, an area at the climatic limit with cold winters and long, cool autumns. The barren, stony terrain gives little and thereby enforces the mineral tension that distinguishes this wine.
- Grape variety & vinification
- Silvaner, a variety long established along the Saale and Unstrut rivers yet often underestimated. Selective hand harvest, twenty hours of skin contact with stems, twenty-four hours of pressing in a basket press, followed by twenty months of ageing on full lees in stainless steel tanks. Spontaneously fermented, racked once before bottling, minimally sulphured, neither filtered nor fined.
- Food recommendations
- Loves anything that itself exercises restraint: pan-fried fish, young goat’s cheese, asparagus, or a bowl of miso soup.
- Special features
- Carl-Friedrich L. Walther, trained on the Mosel and apprenticed to Klaus Zimmerling in Dresden, works organically certified and entirely by hand. His credo he calls “Slow Winemaking, Low Tech” – a philosophy he discovered on a wine tour through Piedmont and South Tyrol, and which has since defined every bottle in his small range. This Silvaner is its quiet, straightforward centrepiece.
