Wine · Terminology

Auslese

German for 'select harvest' — hand-picked ripe bunches, often with some botrytis, usually sweet.

Auslese means "selected harvest": individually chosen fully ripe bunches, picked out from the rest and set aside. It is the third rung of the Prädikatswein ladder, above Spätlese and below Beerenauslese.

At this ripeness level, noble rot often appears in some proportion of the fruit — not required, but common, and it brings honey, apricot and saffron notes alongside the pure Riesling fruit. Most Auslese is sweet; a small amount is fermented dry.

In practice

  • Roughly 83–100 °Oechsle, again varying by region and grape.
  • Hand harvesting is implicit — you cannot select bunches with a machine.
  • Some producers signal a step up within the category with stars (, , ), or with terms like Auslese Goldkapsel — customary, not legal.
  • The best examples age for decades.

Where you'll meet it

What Auslese tastes like

  • Sweet Auslese: 45–100 g/L residual sugar, 7.5–9% alcohol, honeyed apricot and citrus over a spine of acidity that keeps it from cloying. A dessert wine that never feels heavy.
  • Auslese trocken: fermented out to 13–14%, powerful and dense. Rare, and now often labelled Grosses Gewächs instead by VDP members.
  • Botrytis-influenced Auslese: the noble rot marker — saffron, marmalade, a faint gingery bitterness — sits over the fruit rather than replacing it.

Ageing

Sugar and acid together make Auslese one of the longest-lived white wines in the world. Expect roughly:

Age Character
0–5 years Primary — peach, lime, floral
5–15 years Honey and beeswax emerging; petrol note appears
15–30 years Dried apricot, caramel, smoke; sweetness recedes on the palate
30 years + Tertiary and savoury; great bottles are still fresh

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