Drive up the Saar from Trier and you soon notice that different rules apply here than on the broad Mosel. The valley is narrower, the air often fresher, and the best vineyards lie not along the river but in side valleys into which the sun ventures with a certain reserve. It was precisely this reserve that made the Saar famous – and very nearly ruined it.

A side valley with a mind of its own

Officially the Saar is not a wine region in its own right but one of six Bereiche (districts) of the Mosel region. The Deutsches Weininstitut (German Wine Institute) puts the vineyard area of the Mosel as a whole at 8,287 hectares for 2025. The Saar accounts for only a small share of that: the regional association Weinland Mosel gives 793 hectares under vine between Serrig and Konz, 83 per cent of it Riesling. Hardly any wine district in Germany is so single-mindedly devoted to one variety.

Until 2007 the Saar even featured in the region’s name, which was then still Mosel-Saar-Ruwer. In August 2006 the German federal cabinet decided to rename it with the shorter “Mosel”. Since then, you have to look more closely at the label to recognise where a wine comes from.

Cold, wind and blue slate

What defines the Saar is its climate. The US importer VomBoden describes the valley as cold and windy and points out that many sites lie at right angles to the river and therefore benefit less from the moderating effect of the water. Riesling ripens late here and retains plenty of acidity. In cool years this used to be a real problem, and it gave rise to the saying that Saar wine is a beggar in poor years and a nobleman in good ones.

The soil consists mainly of dark Devonian slate, joined in places by diabase, a rock of volcanic origin. The Zilliken estate describes precisely this mixture of grey, finely layered slate and diabase for its Saarburger Rausch, with the vine roots reaching deep down into it. The slopes are steep, often very steep, and therefore expensive to work. In his blog, Wolfgang Staudt cites production costs on steep sites that are many times those on the flat.

Great names in a small space

The most famous site is the Scharzhofberg near Wiltingen. It is associated with the Egon Müller estate, whose forebears acquired the land in 1797. It had previously belonged, as church property, to a monastery in Trier and was sold as national property during the French period. This history is typical: until around 1800 almost all the good Saar sites were in the hands of the Church, and only secularisation brought them into private ownership.

How highly individual sites were already valued in the 19th century is shown by the viticultural map produced in 1868 on behalf of the Royal Government in Trier under the direction of the Prussian tax official Franz Josef Clotten. It was based on the vineyards’ tax brackets – that is, on their yield value – and grouped these into three colour-coded tiers. The Scharzhofberg appears in the highest category, albeit under the name of the whole hillside, Scharzberg. Other names celebrated today, such as the Kanzemer Altenberg or the Saarburger Rausch, were, as the Mosel expert Lars Carlberg notes, not listed on the map at all. Fame, it seems, is also a matter of timing.

The gilded prices of 1900

Around the turn of the century, Saar wine was a luxury. Around 1900, the VDP’s timeline notes, Germany’s finest white wines were as expensive as the great growths of Bordeaux; according to Wolfgang Staudt, Saar Rieslings were at times even dearer. What that meant in practice is shown by a price list from the Berlin wine merchant Maurer & Bracht, part of Roman Niewodniczanski’s collection and quoted by the WeinLetter: a 1904 Scharzhofberger from the Egon Müller estate cost 10 gold marks, while a 1905 Château Margaux cost 4.25 gold marks. A 1900 Ockfener Geisberger was listed at as much as 12 gold marks.

Such prices were also achieved at the Trier auctions. Their principal organiser to this day is the Großer Ring, now the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer regional association of the VDP (the Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter, Germany’s association of top estates). The Großer Ring itself gives 1908 as its founding year, as does Weinland Mosel. The VDP’s history page, however, dates the merger of the three Trier auction groups into the “Trierer Verein von Weingutsbesitzern von Mosel, Saar und Ruwer” to 1910 – the year in which the national Verband Deutscher Naturweinversteigerer was also founded. The Zilliken estate counts among the Großer Ring’s co-founders the royal Prussian forester Ferdinand Geltz, whose name the estate still bears today.

The long decline

Then came the 20th century, and with it the ruptures. Staudt and the WeinLetter cite the same causes: two world wars, the expulsion and murder of the Jewish wine merchants who had marketed Saar wine internationally, and later a demand that favoured cheap, sweet wines. The German wine law of 1971 did the rest, since it put small top sites and large collective sites almost on an equal footing on the label. Those who toiled on the steep slopes of the Saar often received barely more for it on the market than their neighbour on the flat.

Zilliken, too, experienced destruction at first hand: an air raid in 1944 destroyed the manor house and cellars. Fritz and Marianne Zilliken rebuilt the estate after the war, and in 1950 they moved into the cellar in Saarburg’s Heckingstraße, where the estate is still based today. Many steep sites, by contrast, were abandoned and became overgrown.

The renaissance

The turnaround began in the late 1990s. In 1999 Roman Niewodniczanski took over a run-down estate in Wiltingen and continued it under its old name, Van Volxem; the 2000 vintage was already causing a stir. He focused on dry Rieslings from historic sites such as the Scharzhofberg, Kanzemer Altenberg and Wiltinger Gottesfuß, and had overgrown slopes replanted. Weinland Mosel confirms that the vineyard area on the Saar has grown in recent years through the recultivation of old steep sites.

The weather has helped too. In the past, according to Staudt, a truly ripe harvest was achieved two or three times a decade; today it happens almost every year. For a valley that was too cold for centuries, climate change is an ambivalent blessing: it spares winegrowers the anxious wait for ripeness, but demands new answers to heat and drought. And the old names have regained their lustre. At the Großer Ring auction in Trier in 2018, Egon Müller’s 2017 Scharzhofberger Kabinett “Alte Reben” fetched €200 net a bottle – according to the VDP, a world record for a Kabinett (the lightest Prädikat level, traditionally light and delicate, often with some residual sweetness). The previous vintage had already been hailed the year before, at €180 a bottle, as the most expensive Riesling Kabinett ever auctioned, according to Weinland Mosel.

What Saar Riesling tastes like

The style is easy enough to describe, even without awarding points. Weinland Mosel speaks of finesse and minerality, of pale fruits such as apple and citrus, together with blossom and herbs. The wines are considered highly age-worthy and rarely exceed 12% abv. In fruchtsüß (fruity-sweet) Kabinett and Spätlese (“late harvest”, the next Prädikat level up) wines, the acidity balances the sweetness so precisely that you sense the sugar rather than taste it. Dry Saar Rieslings come across as taut and cool, sometimes almost austere in their first year, and open up with time.

Anyone wanting to understand the Saar should therefore not taste only young wines. A Kabinett with ten years of bottle age will usually show better than any description why people here were once prepared to pay more than for Bordeaux – and why it was worth reclaiming the overgrown slopes.