Region & History

The Romans already planted vines on the gentle hills between Mainz, Worms, and Bingen. In 742, the Frankish ruler Carloman donated a church near Nierstein to the Diocese of Würzburg. The associated vineyard site is known today as Niersteiner Glöck and is considered the oldest documented vineyard in Germany. More than a thousand years of tithes, monastic ownership, and tenancy have since rested on this one slope.

The region got its most famous name from a single church in Worms — from around 1740, the vineyards of the Liebfrauenkirche gave rise to the reputation of "Lieben Frauen Milch" (Milk of Our Lady). A good drop from there cost as much in the nineteenth century as a top Bordeaux. In 1910, the Worms Chamber of Commerce made a fateful decision: the name was detached from the vineyard and could henceforth stand for Rhine wine in general. An address became a label.

In 1971, Germany's new wine law cast this label name into a fixed rule for the first time. From then on, Liebfraumilch could only come from Rheinhessen, the Pfalz, and the Nahe, and had to taste semi-sweet; the Rheingau was added as a fourth region only about a decade later. To this day, a Liebfraumilch must consist of at least seventy percent Riesling, Silvaner, Müller-Thurgau, or Kerner. Demand exploded immediately nonetheless, especially in England and the USA. For Rheinhessen, this was both a business and a trap. Anyone abroad who thought of German wine thought of cheap and sweet — not of the steep slopes near Nierstein, where something quite different had long been growing.

The answer came from a handful of young winemakers who refused to accept this any longer. In 2002, Philipp Wittmann from Westhofen and Klaus-Peter Keller from Flörsheim-Dalsheim, among others, founded the group "Message in a Bottle," harvesting by hand and cutting yields significantly. What went into the bottle was dry Riesling from single sites — no more sweet blends from four wine regions. Within a few years, the group became what is now considered the who's who of Rheinhessen.

Today some vineyard sites carry a special seal. Niersteiner Pettenthal, Nackenheimer Rothenberg, or Westhofener Morstein, for instance, bear the VDP.GROSSES GEWÄCHS designation, the highest tier for dry single-vineyard wine. At roughly 27,700 hectares, Rheinhessen is Germany's largest wine region. Of all places, the region once synonymous with sweet mass-market wine now delivers some of the country's most sought-after dry Rieslings. The path from Liebfraumilch to Grosses Gewächs took just one generation.