First, buy the wines on release and age them.

Second, find an estate in Germany that might have started a cellaring program a few years ago and be at the right place at the right time.

When all this comes together, you might then be offered a small parcel of back-vintage wine, pristine from the estate's cellar and never moved, until now.

This happened to us March 2023 in Germany; now the wine has arrived and it's happening to you.

This is just one of those magical, magical vintages - with depth and texture, chewy midpalates dense with minerality and plenty of punch. Yet it is the magical acidity of 2017, the force and length of these wines, that makes them among the top wines for purists, right up there with vintages like 2008, 2010, 2013 and the already-hallowed 2021.

This is unquestionably one of my favorite vintages, in Germany and for Emrich-Schönleber specifically.

I bought a lot on release, though not enough, and so now I open them sparingly and for special occasions only. For example, I brought a bottle of 2017 Emrich-Schönleber Halenberg GG to the @rieslingstudy event in Detroit in May 2023. It was simply a monument - even open for hours the wine barely budged, showing only hints of its depth. It remained steely and salty, unapologetically mineral. This is a wine built for the ages.

The "Halgans" on offer today is just entering its first (truly glorious) drinking window. This is why you age wine.

With an hour open, the "Halgans" began to show layers and layers of juicy stone fruit, citrus oils, green herbal components, minty and salty at the same time. There is a creaminess, but it is fresh and has such polished delineation. On day two, the wine expanded in length and depth but lost none of the tension.

For those of you not familiar, Schönleber's "Halgans" is a declassified Grand Cru sourced completely from the Halenberg vineyard - normally the harvest is simply a week or more before the final "GG" harvest. As such, this is the lighter and leaner of the two wines and it always enters its drinking window a bit earlier.

Thus the 2017 Halenberg GG was simply stoic; the 2017 "Halgans" is singing.

As we've written before, Werner and Frank Schönleber, long considered among the masters of dry Riesling in Germany, are finally getting the recognition they deserve. The price on their top wine - sold only at auction - went up nearly 68% from vintage 2019 to 2020 and the "Grand Cru" GGs have never been in higher demand.

Here is a shot at a perfectly cellared bottle, from a top vintage and in top form, at less than 50% the price of the current Grand Cru. These sorts of offers are likely, unfortunately, to become few and far between as we head into the future.

Thank you for all the support!

Stephen and Robert

This offer is now closed. If you need help finding the wines please email orders@sourcematerialwine.com.