Rheinhessen

Riesling from Rheinhessen is Germany's comeback story: a mostly bone-dry (trocken) white of real density and spice from the country's largest wine region, which spent the 1970s and 1980s pumping out Liebfraumilch and then, from the late 1990s, produced the growers who dragged German Riesling back to the top table. Two sites define it — the steep, iron-red slate of the Roter Hang above the Rhine at Nierstein, and the limestone hills of the Wonnegau in the south.