If you know where to look, 2022 is manna from heaven for Riesling lovers. We had the pleasure of Robert Weil’s Nicolas Langer’s company in the trade last week, giving us ample opportunity to taste and re-taste the wines of this quicksilver German vintage. The wines blew us away with their coiled intensity, succulent fruit, juicy acidity and crystalline citrusy length. A high-voltage year to follow the livewire 2021. It wasn’t always meant to turn out like this. 2022 was the warmest year ever recorded in most of Germany’s wine regions, and the summer was both hot and extremely dry; Wilhelm Weil told us it sometimes felt that the Rhiengau had been transported to the Mediterranean. By summer's end, many growers imagined a vintage of rich, weighty wines akin to 2018. But Weil was not so sceptical. Irrespective of the precision viticulture practised here, the high-altitude hillside vineyards of this iconic grower have what Liam Neeson’s Brian Mills might describe as a very particular set of skills. Even in dry years, not only can Weil’s vines regulate water supply by drawing on reserves from the forest above, but they also possess decisive drainage quality, courtesy of the phyllite soils, meaning they can weather wetter years with success. So, when the rains did arrive in September—and boy, didn’t it rain—Weil’s elevated sites dried off quickly, leaving only the most refreshing, balancing effects of the much-needed moisture when it counted. Come September 20th, when the estate’s army of pickers began to harvest small, concentrated berries with ravishing acidity, Wilhelm Weil must have been pinching himself. “What you will taste comes across as from a cool vintage,” he says, cool as ice. A quick look at the numbers backs up his statement: all the dry wine sits just below 8 g/L of total acidity.But who needs data when the wine tastes so good? Weil’s dry Rieslings from this year are super precise, taut, seamless and insanely delicious. I dare you to keep your hands off these wines! This year’s offer also includes the 2021 Monte Vacano, a Rheingau colossus drawn from a historical lieu-dit on the steepest and stoniest sector of the Gräfenberg Grand Cru. We also list the towering Gräfenberg Grosses Gewächs, which will be officially released in late September. Weil’s higher Prädikats are wines that always take your breath away, and the super-limited 2022s are, again, staggeringly beautiful—the stuff of legend. This year, a cameo of pure botrytis arrived between mid and late October, enabling a thimbleful of nobly rotten berries for Weil to craft every level for the 34th year in a row. And God created Riesling.