2022 Max Kilburg Geierslay Kabinett
2022 Max Kilburg Goldtröpfchen Kabinett
2022 Max Kilburg Ohligsberg Kabinett

Max Kilburg has quickly become one of the more-coveted producers in the Mosel. Today we offer the U.S. allocation of Kilburg's Kabinetts!

IYKYK as the kids say; based on our last Kilburg offer and Max's growing reputation, please be quick to buy because these will disappear quickly!

We have to say it's been almost surreal watching Kilburg's wines explode in the market. We first introduced Max's wines to the U.S. with the 2020 vintage, quietly offering them up in the confusing COVID retail landscape of 2021. They sold really well, people liked them. We were happy. (For fun, we're including the first retail offer, reproduced in full, below, including his origin story and time with Julian Haart, etc.)

Then, a year later, our next Kilburg offer went out and the entire allocation for the U.S. disappeared in a few minutes. We couldn't believe the ferocity of the buying. A few weeks later, bottles that we had just sold appeared on WineBid and ended up trading at more than $100. Then, naturally, the gray marketers came in to make a buck, buying up all the bottles they could find in the European retail market.

The speed of all this has been truly stupefying.

On the other hand, we can't say Max's wines don't deserve this type of engagement; these are among the most linear, crystalline and delineated of Mosel Riesling, dense with fruit and mineral, yet ultra-glossy, polished to a glistening smoothness. The absolutely gushing reviews of the normally staid Mosel Fine Wines reviewers was well warranted.

All this to say, the market isn't wrong here... it's just not usually this efficient?

Thank you for your support as always!

Below you can find the original Max Kilburg Kabinett offer, sent in the spring of 2021.

Two market predictions for you.

First, Mosel wines are due for a serious upward pricing correction, though this is probably pretty obvious to most people paying any attention. Second, and this might be a bit more daring but what the hell: The "Kabinett" will rather quickly become the rarest, most treasured and most expensive of the Prädikats.

In short: The days of sub-$30 Mosel Kabinetts, at least from serious growers working in the top vineyards, are soon coming to a close. Don't miss this.

If the name Max Kilburg has been on a lot of people's minds over the last few years, I'm not sure anyone expected he would so quickly be put at the most elite levels of Mosel winemaking. The quote, above, is only one gushing line from the Mosel Fine Wines reviews.

Honestly, it all felt both somewhat foreign and somehow familiar to read the name Max Kilburg.

We had heard his name a number of times when he had worked with Julian Haart a few years ago. Soon after this time with Julian it was made official, Max would take over his family's historic estate, Geierslay, as the 20th-generation winemaker. Most recently, we had read about Max acquiring an older-vine parcel in the Grand Cru Ohligsberg, the most famous site rising up and around his hometown village of Wintrich. And we had heard about his own small line of wines, sourced from only 1.2 hectares, total, in both the Ohligsberg and the Goldtröpfchen vineyards - the focus of today's offer.

For us, trapped in our homes, in quarantine like everyone else, the reviews made our mouths water. They sounded like exactly the style of wines we love: "The dry wines are gorgeous, light, intense and bone-dry. The Kabinetts are firm, precise, racy and hugely profound," wrote Mosel Fine Wines.

I mean, we love most anything "hugely profound."

And so, we emailed Max and begged for samples. He got them together quickly enough, though international shipping was (and remains) a mess. By the time we tasted through everything, Max was long sold out of 2019.

Determined not to let this happen again, we have organized a fresh-off-the-bottling-line offer of Max's 2020 Grand Cru Kabinetts. (Note: We will offer the dry wines later, once they are bottled.)

But for now, this is not only the official U.S. premiere of Max Kilburg's wines, it is one of your first chances to taste the more serious wines of the vintage 2020, which by most accounts seems very, very good - especially if you like lighter, more delicate wines.

Max wrote to us of his own 2020ers: "I would say the 2020 Kabinetts are a bit lighter compared to the 2019ers. They have great acidity; 2020 is really a classical vintage, more on the quiet side, not as opulent or as loud as the last two vintages. It is more of a throwback to 2017, 2004 or even the late 1990s. They are light fragrant and elegant wines. It was a perfect year for producing Kabinetts."

That seems like a good place to stop.

Like we said, Max is farming only 1.2 hectares, and even though we said we'd take everything we could get, there is not much to go around. Please give us your maximum order and we will do our best!

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