Wine · Terminology

Trockenbeerenauslese

Germany's sweetest wine — shrivelled, botrytised berries picked one by one, sometimes barely fermenting at all.

Trockenbeerenauslese — TBA — is the top of Germany's Prädikatswein ladder: individually selected berries so thoroughly shrivelled by noble rot that they look like raisins. The juice is syrup, the yeast struggles to ferment it at all, and the finished wine often sits at 5–7% alcohol with 200–400 g/L of sugar.

The name misleads everyone once. Trocken here means the dried berries, not a dry wine — TBA is the sweetest thing German viticulture produces.

In practice

  • Roughly 150–154 °Oechsle minimum, and often far higher.
  • Made only in exceptional botrytis years; many estates go a decade between bottlings.
  • Yields are almost absurd — a great vineyard may give a few hundred half-bottles.
  • Fermentation can take months and stops of its own accord.

Where you'll meet it

  • Germany — Mosel, Rheingau, Pfalz, Nahe.
  • Austria, where Burgenland produces TBA more regularly thanks to the Neusiedlersee.
  • Auction lists, where old TBA is among the most expensive white wine on earth.

The name, decoded

Part Means
Trocken- Dried — the shrivelled state of the berries
-beeren- Berries — selected individually
-auslese Selected harvest

Compare: Auslese = selected bunches; Beerenauslese = selected berries; Trockenbeerenauslese = selected dried berries. The ladder is describing increasingly fine selection, not increasing dryness.

And note the contrast with a wine labelled Riesling trocken, where trocken genuinely does mean dry. Same word, opposite implication — one of German wine law's cruellest jokes on beginners.

Drinking it

  • Serve at 8–10 °C in tiny pours.
  • Ageing potential is effectively indefinite — well-kept TBA from the 1950s is still vivid, because sugar and acidity together preserve it almost perfectly.
  • The Austrian equivalent and Tokaji's Eszencia push the concentration even further.

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