Pickers on Schonfels clip themselves by carabiner to a tractor parked at the top of the vineyard — the slope ends in a rock face that drops a few hundred feet to the road below. That's the price of admission for one of the Saar's great sites, a cliff planted with ungrafted vines around 110 years old, dating to the era when Saar wines were the most expensive in the world. Florian Lauer's father let it go fallow in the 1980s because it was too expensive, too difficult and too dangerous to farm; Florian brought it back, and it now yields one of his three dry Grosses Gewachs bottlings alongside Feils and Kupp (the GG on the label marks a dry Grand Cru). Schonfels is the most structured and mineral of the estate's dry wines and normally demands bottle age or a long decant, but 2021 was unusual: a vintage the trade wrote off as a Kabinett year that in fact delivered outstanding dry Rieslings, with ripeness levels barely off the warmer 2019 and 2020 and Lauer's dry wines already showing well on release while keeping the acid and structure to age. Four years on, this is close to the sweet spot — still worth a decant if you're opening it tonight.