Story #7 - Great White Wine: Riesling vs Chardonnay
November 29th, 2025 | Alexander Mackh, Co-Founder
Burgundy taught me something important very early on: once you start paying attention, nothing in wine is accidental. Soil, slope, climate, the shape of the barrel, the moment you decide to pick – it all adds up. You can try to rationalise it with numbers and classifications, but in the end the real impact is sensory. It is what stays in your memory after the bottle is empty.
Chardonnay is a perfect example of this. It is the most widely planted white grape in the world, and for good reason. It can be a sharp, salty glass from a cool coastal region, a layered, nutty Meursault that needs a decade, or a slightly too opulent, oaky monster from somewhere warm. Most people, even those who “don’t know much about wine”, have had at least one good experience with Chardonnay. That matters. When the average global level of a grape is solid, it builds a quiet trust: you see Chardonnay on a list and you feel relatively safe. At the top of the pyramid that trust turns into desire. Think of the Côte de Beaune, of Puligny-Montrachet, Meursault, Chassagne-Montrachet, or the Grand Crus of Chablis. These are not just wines; for many people they are reference points for what white wine can be. It is no coincidence that some of the most expensive white wines ever sold are bottles of Chardonnay from a few limestone slopes in Burgundy that, on a map, look almost insignificant.
The culture and structure around Chardonnay reinforce this. Burgundy has a classification system that has been refined over more than a century: regional wines, village wines, Premier Cru and Grand Cru. A bottle labelled “Bourgogne Blanc” prepares you for something completely different than one labelled “Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru”, and the system, for all its complexity, generally respects that contract. Interestingly, Burgundy accounts for only a small percentage of France’s vineyard area, yet its influence on how we talk about terroir and hierarchy is enormous. It has become the template, consciously or unconsciously, for how many people think about “serious” wine.
Riesling’s story, especially in Germany, is more complicated. Riesling makes up roughly a quarter of the country’s vineyard surface, yet far fewer people have tasted great Riesling than great Chardonnay. Part of that is historical. Germany and Austria went through scandals in the 1980s involving additives and manipulated sweetness that badly damaged trust in anything that looked like “German white wine”. Part of it is stylistic. Riesling can be bone dry, delicately off-dry, or unapologetically sweet, and the label does not always make this clear. If you order Chardonnay in a restaurant, you might worry about oak, but you rarely worry whether the wine will be dry. With Riesling, many people still do.
The German classification systems don’t make life easier at first glance. On one side, there is a Burgundian-style hierarchy that has developed over time: regional wines, village wines (Ortswein), then Erste Lage and Große Lage for the best sites. From Große Lage vineyards, growers can produce Grosses Gewächs – the famous “GG” – which, by law and by intent, must be dry and comes from classified top vineyards. On the other side, running parallel, stands the traditional ripeness-based system: Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese and so on. These terms describe the sugar content of the grapes at harvest, not the sweetness of the finished wine. A Spätlese – literally “late harvest” – can be fermented dry, off-dry or sweet. It tells you how ripe the grapes were, not whether there will be sugar left in your glass. From a legal and technical perspective this all makes sense. From a consumer perspective it can be maddening.
This is where individual producers make a huge difference. In the Saar I found my personal key to Riesling through the wines of Peter Lauer. The Saar is a cooler, steeper tributary of the Mosel, with vineyards that look more like climbing walls than farmland. Some slopes reach gradients of well over 60 degrees, making them among the steepest vineyards in the world. Everything has to be worked by hand. The soils are dominated by slate, which retains heat and reflects it back to the vines while giving that distinctive smoky, stony signature to the wines. It is a region where Riesling does not have an easy life, and that is exactly why the wines can be so compelling.
What impressed me with Peter Lauer was not just the quality in the glass, but the clarity in the system behind it. When he bottles a GG, I know the wine is dry, from a top site, and made with serious intent. For his other wines – whether Ortswein, Erste Lage or Große Lage – he adds a small but crucial piece of information: a letter indicating the style. “T” stands for Trocken, dry. “F” stands for Feinherb, off-dry. It sounds almost banal, but this tiny gesture suddenly makes a double system readable. The vineyard name tells me where the wine comes from; the letter tells me how it will feel on the palate. The more vintages I taste, the more I appreciate how consistently this promise is kept. For me, these have been some of the most complete Riesling experiences I’ve ever had, dry and off-dry alike.
So why go through all these lengths? Why classify individual vineyards, argue for decades about what qualifies as a Grand Cru or a Große Lage, fine-tune cellar practices to match those expectations and, frankly, make your life harder? Because while the experience of a great wine is emotional, it helps if the framework around it is rational. Acidity, pH, alcohol, ripeness levels, soil types, barrel choices, classification – they are all ways of giving structure to something that is, in the end, consumed with the senses. A great white wine is not just a chemical solution with nice numbers. It is complexity and depth, tension and balance, but also desirability, story and memory.
One could argue that Chardonnay carries a little bit more of everything: more history in the luxury segment, more coherent communication, more collective memories of great bottles. But my time with Riesling, especially in the Saar, has convinced me that greatness does not belong to one grape or one region. It can appear as a dry, finely chiselled Chardonnay from a limestone slope in Burgundy, or as an off-dry, slate-driven Riesling from a vertiginous hill above the Saar. The grapes are different, the traditions are different, the labelling is sometimes painfully different. What unites them, at their best, is that you finish the glass and realise you are already thinking about the next time you might drink that wine again. That, for me, is the real definition of great white wine.