Egon Muller at 13 surprised me, too. But probably a victim of pricing - these are very! expensive relative to everyone other than Keller. Perhaps the German Riesling market is just not hot enough for people with the bucks to focus that much on ‘number 2’ to Keller’s number 1.
For me - and I’ve only had a very small handful of E. Muller - the value isn’t there. I mostly am focused on feinherb/Kabinett, and comparing Muller with my favorites (Prum, Wiili, Falkenstein, etc.) I didn’t see any significant quality gap. So why pay more?
The answer is: if you value price over other attributes, to signal to yourself or others that you have the money to buy the best. Or if your palate is different from mine - a definite possibility.
There is a lot here that it hard for me to trackback on. What are you looking for? Just most held German producers overall? Or by region? Specific to Riesling?
I will see what I can do. Travelling atm, but will try to run these when I get home.
I wonder if this could be a byproduct of filtering? Now having filtered my whites for a few years, I can see what huge difference there is between crossflow filtering, plate filtering and lenticular filtering. Micron levels also play a huge part and sterile filtering Rieslings has a huge impact on the wine.
Expanding to all vs Riesling didn’t change it substantively, but the Riesling query is easier and more precise.
Donhoff and Prum are dead even in numbers with Keller a little behind and then >50% drop off in holdings with S-F. The last couple are an order of magnitude less in holdings than the top. (Which is normal not just for Germany.)
I can more later - this was just an easy query while I was waiting for my flight.
I should have mentioned, and wonder if this is true for others too:
German wine, Riesling in particular, is now a much larger portion of my cellar than it used to be, both in terms of total volume and number of different wines. And it was always large. I don’t have exact numbers, but the shift since 2018-19 (years, not vintages) has been dramatic. There are certain reasons like the crazy price of Burgundy. But the bottom line is my focus, once divided among many different vinous attentions, has further collapsed to certain regions/wine types, plus new explorations. This phenomenon also coincides with overall decrease in buying as well since 2022, which makes sense.
Pricing. While there are many wealthy people on this board, a good amount of us simply cannot afford having having Egon Müllers wines in our top five.
I have loved the few Müllers I have tasted, but when I can fill my cellar with great stuff from my top 5 at the price of a single Müller it makes no sense on a limited budget.
True but back in the day pricing was not so far out of whack for some of the old timers. It is sad because I have had probably more stunning Egon Müller wines than any other sweet wine, they really need to time to show their full potential.
When I have some time, I want to dial into this by vintages and/or purchase year. I suspect that the Prum/Donnhoff top heaviness reflects the similar ages of WBers and CT users who stocked these in the past. I am curious what producers are surging but haven’t been enough to overcome this historical bias. Ludes and Falkenstein come to mind.