If you like this style, I recommend checking out Fass Selections.
http://www.fassselections.com/
Another producer I like that isn’t mentioned is Markus Molitor.
While I think Egon Muller’s Kabinett can be and usually is terrific; at current US pricing, there are myriad other places I would spend my money
A few I would rec checking out, and most of these are just repeats of previous rec’s:
Willi Schaefer Himmelreich Kabinett more so than his Domprobst, but that is personal preference, and both are solid
Donnhoff Oberhauser Leistenberg
JJ Prum W-Sonnnenuhr and G Himmelreich
S Frohlich Felseneck
Zilliken Saarburger Rausch
Falkenstein Euchariusberg
Happy Hunting!
Vinopolis can ship to Indiana(I think), and has a great selection of German wines.
For German wines, I like and drink, mostly Kabinett. Messmer makes lovely wines across the board that are very affordable, along with the many good recommendations above.
Of course shipping makes relatively inexpensive wine not so inexpensive.
Donnhoff and Nik Weis St UrbansHof are my “go to” kabinetts…there are several producers making delicious wines from Urziger Wurzgarten
Popped one 2 nights ago - lovely, vibrant and long. Delivers a boatload of pleasure for <$25.
The original question is what is available in the US. The answer is that there are a lot of German Kabinetts of very high quality available in the US. There are at least three high quality importers of wines into the US that focus on German wines. They are Terry Theise http://www.skurnik.com/terry-theise/ , Rudi Wiest and Vom Boden (Stephen Bitterolf). Be sure to read Terry Theise’s catalog - great philosophy book on German wines. Some of my favorite German wine producers are Zilliken, JJ Prum, Reinhold Haart, Schloss Lieser, von Schubert (Maximin Grunhauser), Selbach, Willie Schaefer and Fritz Haag.
I do not know what is available in rural Indiana, but I think you could find a lot of these in Chicago. See, e.g, https://www.flickingerwines.com/wineregions/Germany.aspx These are the German wines available from the store with the best German wine selection in my local market. Germany. MacArthur Beverages
As for wines that are not too sweet and not too dry, that is getting harder and harder with respect to German wines because of climate change (the riper the grape, the more sugar - which either stays as residual sugar or gets converted to alcohol). A number of people have recommended wines that are drier, which means generally that alcohol levels are higher.
Two other ways to find wines that are less sweet (or at least the perception is less sweet) involve trying to find wines with higher acidity. The higher the acidity, the less sweet a wine tastes, even with the same amount of residual sugar. Two cooler areas of German wine where the wines do a wonderful job of retaining acidity are the Saar (see my recommendation of Zilliken) and the Ruwer (see my recommendation of von Schubert). Another way is to look for vintages where wines tend to have retained acidity. Some relatively recent vintages would be 2008, 2010, 2013, 2014 and 2015. In this regard, I would probably skip 2011 and 2016 where the acidity is a bit lower in general (in these types of vintages especially, head for the Saar and the Ruwer). If I have to recommend one wine, if you can still find it, that would seemingly fit your taste preferences it would be Zilliken’s Saarburger Rausch Kabinett from 2015 - a really wonderful wine.
Another recommendation is to try a Riesling from Alsace. Many Rieslings from Alsace are very dry (like Trimbach). A producer I recommend is Albert Mann. Really nice wines, but wines that taste different from German Rieslings.
If your main concern is sweetness, it’s not the QmP classification you should worry about but the other information on the label. Look for the word “feinherb” on any wine for something with the kind of light sweetness you may be looking for, or “trocken” for drier wines. You can also use alcohol content in combination with QmP level as a proxy for sweetness. I would say a reasonable rule of thumb could be to stay at 8.5% alcohol or higher in Kabinetts, 9.5% for Spatlese, 10% for Auslese. But also bear in mind that perceived sweetness could be much lower or higher depending on the wine, and there are a lot of stunning Rieslings with lovely low alcohol contents that you can drink all evening.
Plenty of good producers recommended above. Donnhoff’s Qba often drinks like a kabinett and is well distributed.
Same. I was lucky to grab a couple mags of the 2018 that I’ll hold on to while I drink my 750s.
Thanks for your thoroughness, Howard. I know that I and probably many others here besides the OP benefit. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
Hans - you got some pretty good advice above but the one thing I would highlight from all of it is that as mentioned and as you must know, Kabinett doesn’t necessarily correlate to sweetness. It’s how dry the producer ferments his wine. The idea of the GG’s is that you pick at Spatlese levels of sugar but ferment dry.
That said, I don’t know where you are in Indiana but when I was in Bloomington a long time ago there were one or two stores in Indianapolis, but it was far better to make the drive up to Chicago. Get some pizza while you’re up there and pick up your stash of wine!
Thank you for everyone’s help. We’re going to try as many of these as we can find. We’re about 100 miles from Indianapolis, but we get there with some regularity. Also to Chicago and Cincinnati now and then. We are not opposed to having some shipped although I understand that Indiana laws make it unnecessarily complicated. We appreciate everyone teaching us as you have…
Hans and Theri
After looking at Kahn’s site, I‘d go for ‘15 Haart PG Kab to start although ‘16 Zilliken Rausch might be more open right now.
I love German wines and have been drinking them since the early to mid 1970s. There are a whole bunch of really good threads here about German wines. Anyone wanting to learn more could do much worse than to spend time using the search feature here and finding some of them.
Indeed, trying a “feinherb” is a good advice if you are worried by excessive sweetness. Adam’s “in der Saengerei” is a wonderful version, as well as Selbach-Oster “Zeltinger Sonnenuhr ur-alte Reben” (very old vines). Alcohol level in these is higher than for the typical Kabinett (~11% instead of ~8%) and this is reflected in a somewhat richer, fuller-bodied wine.
Another way to avoid excessive sweetness is to drink older Kabinetts.
Keller Limestone Kabinett is around $30 a bottle and not difficult to find. The less sweet Qba is about $25.
Why is that?
I really prefer my Kabinetts as babies, but I also seek you dry and higher acid Riesling.
I am a lawyer and not a chemist so someone else will have to give you the science, but German wines taste less sweet as they get older. This is based on experience.
If you prefer your Kabinetts young and with higher acid, go to the Saar and the Ruwer. If you want something bone dry, try Trimbach’s Cuvee Frederic Emile.
While I applaud this idea, my experience is that ‘older’ means pretty old - like 10+ years to see significant development. Challenge is finding these. I look all the time, and almost never see any trocken/kabinett/feinherb in the market more than a few years old (in the US). If anyone has any sources they’d like to share please do!