Two I’ve had recently and liked:
2016 Markus Molitor Riesling Graacher Domprobst Spätlese White Capsule - great
2016 Gunderloch Riesling Rheinhessen Nierstein Trocken - very good, very interesting and pretty complex
Does anyone have a plan “on paper” for how they strategize purchases? Now that I’ve identified some of my favorite producers and wines that I know I want to continue buying, I want to be more mindful and systematic of how much I’ll be buying year-by-year in future vintages.
For this, I’m starting to put together a spreadsheet to help me decide how many bottles to cellar, and I’d be happy to get some input (I will share once done). If looking at a pattern of vintage characteristics by which to base my purchases for a given wine, rather than list a specific year, there are too many variables unless I condense it down to general terms related to acidity, ripeness, botrytis, etc. The other option is to just list the year of each vintage moving forward, so you can keep a record of how many bottles you plan to purchase each year or still need to backfill in a given year. Thoughts?
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Brian, your approach is far to rational for me. This is insanity, at age 54 to keep buying when the cellar is overflowing already. Making a plan for insanity? Sorry, no help from me but if you ever pass by I’ll be happy to share some fine bottles 
![[truce.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/d/d33e712b50d5efc2425bf219c404fbdb7ed0ba50.gif "truce"){kind=small}
My two lockers are full and I have ~100 bottles pending from various retailers. I need rational 
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Brian -
I start with my budget. It’s been roughly the same for the past 5 years, although the percentage of my budget spent on German Riesling has steadily risen, and I’d guess it will be about 50-60% of the total for the foreseeable future. Then I buy producers. Since I’m happy drinking across the pradikat, I tend to take what the vintage gives rather than seeking out specific wines each vintage, but I give a lot of thought about which producer’s wines to buy in a given year. Some are easier than others (for example, i know I want everything that Julian Haart makes and there isn’t that much. I know I want everything that Thomas Haag makes but if I bought everything it would use too much of my resources because there are so many wines). I tend to buy all the pradikat wines in one fell swoop (with the exception of Prum, which is after the others), and then do the same with dry wines. That way, I’m really making all similar decisions at one time and with all information. And it’s easier to stay on budget and stick to a plan when you are only buying two or three times a year. I’ve been lucky enough to attend the trier auctions for the last few years so I save money for that and have a miscellaneous slush fund in my budget that I can use at the auctions if it turns out that I want to buy more than I’d planned there (which now seems to happy every year). I spend a lot of time planning.
A
I’ve bought various producers every year since 2011, and went heavier in 2015. I’ve slowed down purchases the past few years so that it doesn’t skew my cellar too much, but considering the high quality to price ratio and ageability, it’s just silly not to put down a lot of bottles. Good luck with that plan! ![[wink.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/04707e6a7bbb03e0153e349d8a9270d30e1e9525.gif "wink"){kind=small}
My “strategy” is to wait until the Riesling experts here are all posting on how great the current vintage is. I then call Phil at Macarthurs and buy 2-3 cases scattered amongst my favorite producers and a couple of new ones.
Not on paper, but I have gotten to the point where I know about how many bottles of German wine I drink per year, and I try to buy about the same number in each new vintage. It allows me to keep a 20 year inventory rotating through the cellar. That way I can be sure I will have aged wines across all styles, and also have younger stocks when I want something fresh and fruity.
Calling Phil is a great strategy.
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+1
PM me if you need his contact info
Sounds complicated. I just take each vintage as it comes and decide from there.
The 2018 Selbach Oster Zeltinger Schlossberg Spatlese * is one of the best young Rieslings I’ve tasted in quite some time. That would be a good one to start with!
Delicious wine in a delicious range. Selbach killed it in 2018.
I have tons of German Riesling. Wife said liked sweeter wines when I started collecting, so I took a look into it. Never turned back.
Didn’t help my first bottle I bought was a Dönnhoff…
Shortly after I got a wine subscription to Dee Vine Wines (RIP).
That and getting good deals of German rieslings on Premier Cru and Garagiste back in the early days…
Unless you find the planning process really fun, I wouldn’t bother with anything so systematic. If you know the producers you like, plan to buy them every year. Buy more in vintages you think are up your alley, less in others. It can be a delight to make the choices every year as you learn more and more. Base your choices on tasting to the degree possible, and buy the things you love in enough quantity to taste them over time. The fact is that you may end up being limited by what’s available to you more so than by any plan you put in place. It may be that wines and producers will drop off your list, and that others will be added.
Also, no matter how much thinking about it you do, you will be wrong a lot of the time. That’s okay. As long as you have enough wine at various degrees of maturity, with enough variety to match you food/occasion needs, you’re doing great. We all look back and think “I wish I’d bought more of that!” or sometimes “why did I buy so much of that?” Having more of something in the cellar is a great pleasure, but I’ll let you in on a secret - sometimes drinking the last bottle, knowing you have no more, is a great pleasure as well.
Great to see you make an appearance.
We’ve started to take a more systematic approach in the last year or so. We’re still in the learning phase so a lot of our purchases have been opportunistic and exploratory, but we’re starting to really dial in what we do and don’t like and to that end we’re trying to put a system together to prioritize purchases of things we know we will be happy we bought down the road, and to acquire things we’re curious about rather than just random crap that comes across our email inboxes. We’ve found it’s a lot easier to try and backfill burgundy to educate ourselves or buy half-cases of Prum for the cellar when we didn’t blow the wine budget on some WA wine we’ve had a million times just because it was on special.
For example, we love Rhone wine, and 2015 and 2016 were killer vintages, so last year when all that stuff was coming out we decided to make a list of all the 2015 northern rhone and 2016 cdp wines we wanted, found them, ranked them, and used the lion’s share of our wine budget throughout the year to buy them in priority order. We still purchased other stuff, but it was mostly cheaper cellar defenders or the odd one-off (or 2008 champagne). We also did a lot of “research” as to what german riesling producers we really like and have a shortlist. We discovered that neither of us like Donnhoff so it was nice to cross that off the list. We’re long on Prum, S-O, Schaefer-Froehlich, Von Winning, and a few more.
This year we’re trying to sock away some of the german riesling producers we do like (piece of cake, and easy on the wallet) and backfill burgundy for educational purposes (harrowing, spendy), so we’re doing a similar thing. We also have a couple things we know we want year-in and year-out so we’re budgeting for those when they come out as well (for me Foillard Cote du Py is one of those things, for Lauren, certain champagnes) and just trying to buy so many fewer random bottles, but that’s a small portion of our overall buying strategy, and like Sarah said, we take each year as it comes and adjust accordingly to what we want to learn and what we want to accomplish. I think last year was really good for cellar defenders so we can probably take a break in that department. We’re trying to not buy much WA wine since we have so much, and direct our CA dollars towards our twice-a-year Selyem allocation.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that for randos, we built an algorithm to make the buy decision for us and I think it’s working pretty well so far!
Buy if 1.5q + 2s + 2.5d + 2.5m + 2o ≥ 30
I’ll let you guess what the variables are 
My brain is fried right now
Two people that work in finance throw an algorithm and a spreadsheet at their wine purchasing, really riveting stuff, I know 
If you like Keller and Egon Muller you must try Julian Haart’s wines. Rheinholdt’s nephew and is making some superlative wines. Ohligsberg and Goldtropchen.
Really hard to get now though with his Schubertslay parcel moving to Keller and Klaus-Peter’s Kabinett selling for $1000+ apparently.