Selbach-Oster has made wine for 400 years. Their steep slopes produce Riesling wines of top quality, grown in harmony with Nature, entailing lots of time-consuming manual labor, and it is these values they seek to preserve.
Selbach-Oster cultivates 21 hectares (51 acres) in some of the best steep slopes on the Mosel: 98 percent are planted with Riesling, 2 percent Pinot Blanc. Many of their vineyards are ungrafted, some up to 100 years old, and these venerable vines yield highly aromatic fruit from small, thick-skinned juicy berries.
Their focus on quality starts with low yields and meticulous care in each detail of working the vines, entailing an enormous amount of hard physical work – particularly in steep slopes. This is especially true during harvest when they pick the grapes by hand in multiple passes in our steep slopes.
The fermentation, mostly with wild, indigenous yeast, takes place in cold cellars which help preserve the fine, multifaceted aromas and the crispness of the juice. Half of our wines mature in big, old oak barrels (“Fuder”) that do not add any woody flavor to the wine, but let it breathe and mature. Depending on what Nature gives them, Selbach-Oster produces Riesling wines that range from completely dry to the sweetness of dessert wines, from elegant and delicate to rich and complex. No matter what the degrees of dryness or of sweetness, all of their wines exhibit pristine minerality with relatively little alcohol – the paradigm of great Mosel Riesling.