The wine... is really good with fresh butternut squash risotto. Bright clean Riesling fruit paired with rich, buttery and nutty pasta flavors can make for a good dinner. Dry Riesling rarely gets easier to enjoy than this: the wine is refreshing but not too edgy. I love 12 percent alcohol whites. Pretty fruit, and no heat.  

The estate... is organically farmed by Olivier Spanier. His family have cultivated the land around Hohen-Sulzen (near Worms) in the Rheinhessen for many generations. In the vineyard Spanier follows many of the tenets of Biodynamic agriculture. Spanier’s wife Carolin Gillot is also a talented winemaker with her own estate in the Rheinhessen, which means their 3-year-old son may be genetically hard-wired to grow outstanding Riesling.

The map... The Rheinhessen is a difficult area to organize. It is a large (61,000-acre) and relatively undifferentiated mass of towns that have an unnerving tendency to end with the suffix “heim.” It boggles my mind and resists compartmentalization. Take a map of the area out of context and one is left to look at a Wisconsin-shaped blob bordered on the east and north by the Rhein river. Because wine towns are scattered across a large landmass, the growers who are reshaping the region are often working in isolation from each other, and far from the Rhein. Today young idealists like Spanier and Gillot are creating a degree of recognition for their recently anonymous hometowns.