For a long time Germany was known abroad for one thing, sweet Riesling, and not much else. That stopped being the whole story a while ago. Over the last decade a younger generation has changed the conversation, inheriting family vines or scraping together a few hectares of their own, farming organically and biodynamically, and working in the cellar with spontaneous ferments and as little added as they can manage. The growth has been almost comic in scale: by some counts German natural wine grew more than twentyfold between 2016 and 2024.

Growth is not the whole picture, though, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. This is a scene with friction in it. The old guard and the new do not always agree on what quality means, the establishment distrusts the bottle variation that comes with leaving wine alone, and rising costs press hardest on the smallest growers. What holds it together is conviction rather than consensus, which is usually where the interesting wine is found.

We carry three regions at the moment. In Rheinhessen, the youthful heart of all this, Andi Mann farms hills of limestone and porphyry his family has worked since 1699, and Antoine Lucchesi and Daisy Merrick of Soma Vines set up four hectares a few fields from where Antoine used to work for him. In Franconia, cool and structured Silvaner country, 2Naturkinder treat the vineyard as habitat first, with bat boxes between the rows, while Andi Weigand presses sixty-year-old vines on a basket press from the 1920s. In the Pfalz, on granite, Dennis Wolf makes purist limestone Riesling and Hannes and Claudiu blend across vintages in a solera.

Baden and the Mosel are next on our list, the one for its Burgundian Pinot, the other for steep slate Riesling now finding its own natural voice. For now, expect field-blend whites with real texture, skin contact that stays light rather than heavy, and reds that are pale, peppery and better served cool. Very little of it resembles what most people still picture when they hear German wine.