Ernst Loosen on old vines, Burgundy prices, the bottle of 1947 that changed everything — and why Riesling is finally going somewhere.
Following a LoosenBarry masterclass tasting in March 2026, I sat down with Ernst Loosen for a one-on-one conversation. What follows draws on that interview, along with notes taken during the tasting itself.
The Man and the Method
Ernst Loosen is not easy to summarise. He trained as an archaeologist. He took over a wine estate. He rebuilt a category. And somewhere along the way, he became the kind of person who will tell you, without particular drama, that he once tasted a 1947 dry Riesling that was so good it made him throw out his entire winemaking approach overnight.
He took over the Dr Loosen estate in Bernkastel-Kues, on the Mosel, on the 1st of January 1988. What he inherited was a property with more than two centuries of history, ungrafted vines on some of the region's most celebrated sites — Wehlener Sonnenuhr, Graacher Domprobst, Ürziger Würzgarten, Erdener Treppchen — and a category that had largely lost its credibility. German Riesling by the late 1980s meant volume, simplified sweetness, and supermarket shelf space. The wines that had formerly been spoken of alongside the great whites of Burgundy had quietly become an embarrassment.
Loosen went in the opposite direction. Less fertiliser. Lower yields. Large neutral Fuder casks retained. Ungrafted vines are preserved rather than replanted. Longer time on lees. Later releases. The kind of decisions that, taken together, made him look either visionary or stubborn, depending on when you were watching.
Over the following decade, it became clear which one it was. Dr Loosen became a reference point not just for Mosel Riesling but for the argument that the category deserved serious attention — that it could age, that it was complex, that the relationship between sugar and quality was far subtler than the market had been led to believe.
The influence spread outward. A collaboration with Chateau Ste. Michelle in Washington State — the Eroica Riesling, launched in 1999 — showed that the method could survive transplantation to a radically different climate. Oregon followed. And now Burgundy, a project he started in 2022, working with Chardonnay as a négociant — buying grapes or freshly pressed juice and doing the élevage himself. He talks about it with a mixture of genuine excitement and barely concealed exasperation at the people involved.
LoosenBarry, the collaboration with Jim Barry Wines in Clare Valley, fits into this trajectory but is different from it in one important way. It is not Loosen arriving somewhere and applying his method to local fruit. It is a genuine exchange between two parties who have been friends for the better part of four decades — and a transfer, not of style, but of thinking.
A Bottle of 1947
Before the LoosenBarry story, there is an earlier story — the one Loosen tells when asked what actually changed his mind about how wine should be made.
It was not a research trip. It was not a consultation with a famous winemaker. It was a customer — a very old customer of the estate — who arrived one day with thirteen bottles of 1947 Graacher Himmelreich. A dry wine, 60 years old at that point. Loosen had been expecting, at best, an interesting oxidised relic.
"I mainly expected an old oxidised wine. And then I said — what is this? It's a dry wine, 60 years old, and perfectly mature. Not f***ing oxidised. And a beautiful colour."
He opened it and tasted it. And spent the following weeks thinking about what it meant.
"I thought — we have to change all our winemaking. We have to go back to the old winemaking. We changed from one year to the other."
His winemaker at the time was not entirely enthusiastic. He came in the next day with a piece of paper and asked Loosen to sign it — a formal document stating that if the wines turned out badly, it was not on him. Loosen signed it. The wines did not turn out badly.
That single bottle is the origin point for everything that followed: the return to large neutral oak, the long lees contact, the refusal to chase early clarity. Not a philosophy arrived at gradually, but a conviction formed in one afternoon and acted on the following morning.
Taking Over — and What Changed Immediately
You arrived at the estate in 1988. Did you feel you needed to protect what was there first, or did you change things immediately?
The answer is immediate and unambiguous.
"We immediately changed. During the harvest of 1987, we changed a lot of things. We went back to the old way — less is more, more selection. In the old days, they put everything in one bucket and brushed it into the barrel. For us, selection is one of the most important steps for making great wine. And that starts at harvest."
The specific problem on the Mosel is botrytis. They are on a river, which means moisture, which means noble rot is always a presence. For sweet wines, botrytis is valuable. For dry wines, it is the enemy.
"You can do only great dry wines with 100% healthy grapes. Noble rot is great with sweet wines, but not with dry wines. So you have to select the healthy grapes out and separate them from the rest. You can't stop the weather. If it is raining and it gets warm, immediately the botrytis starts."
Old vines make this easier — not for romantic reasons, but for practical ones. The berries are smaller, the bunches are looser, and the skin is thicker, which makes it harder for botrytis to take hold. One berry can be affected without immediately infecting its neighbours. And the loose structure of old vine bunches dries out faster after rain, which is often what determines whether a harvest is salvageable or not.
The ungrafted vines at Dr Loosen include material going back to 1940. The oldest vines on the estate are 150 years old — and those 150-year-old vines were themselves grown from cuttings taken from vines that were already 150 years old.
"150, plus 150, plus 150 — that is 450 years. Just third generation from medieval time."
During harvest, every picker works with three buckets. Red for botrytised grapes. Black for something else. White for healthy material. The selection happens from the first day to the last, in every row, by every picker.
Friendship, Drinking, and the London Wine Trade Fair
The LoosenBarry project begins, like most things in Loosen's professional life, with a relationship rather than a business decision. His connection with Peter Barry goes back somewhere between 35 and 40 years — he is vague on the exact number, which seems deliberate.
How did you and Peter Barry first meet?
"I have known Peter since — I don't know — 30, 35 or 40 years. A wine merchant in St. John's Wood showed me a Jim Barry wine. I liked it very much. So I went to Peter's booth at the fair. And since then, we have been friends."
What cemented the friendship was not the wine trade. It was access to parties — specifically, the legendary end-of-fair events organised by Penfolds and Lindemans, which, by all accounts, were the events of the week and not easy to get into. Peter Barry always knew how to get there.
"It's a friendship through a lot of drinking. A lot of drinking. Everybody who knows Peter — my God. These horses can drink."
Sam Barry picks up the story from the family's side. His brother Tom worked a harvest at Dr Loosen in 2011 — a vintage that happened to be extremely high in acidity, which meant Tom spent several weeks learning how to deacidify Riesling. A technique he has never needed to use in Clare Valley, and almost certainly never will.
From 2011, the Berry Brothers started attending the international Riesling conventions — in Germany, at Chateau Ste. Michelle, and eventually in Australia at Franklin Estate in 2015. It was after that Australian event that the conversation became concrete. The barrel — a 2,700-litre Fuder, slightly smaller than the 3,000-litre one they had planned for — arrived at Jim Barry Wines on Valentine's Day, 2016. Loosen was there. They started looking for a vineyard the next day.
Peter Barry's contribution to the project is not winemaking but character. His most memorable line from a dinner in China — relayed by Loosen with considerable affection — was delivered to a table of ten, late in the evening:
"I only drink to make boring people more interesting."
The Vineyard Question and Block 18
With Loosen on the ground and the barrel ready, the question was where to put the fruit. They started at Florita — Jim Barry's most famous vineyard, the one that had defined Clare Valley Riesling for a generation. Loosen tasted the fruit and asked a single question.
"Where is the block with the most hang time?"
The answer led them away from Florita and northeast to the Wolta Wolta property — higher elevation, cooler, and crucially, on slate. The same soil type as the Mosel. Sam Barry explains what that means in practice:
"Rieslings grown on slate tend to hold their acidity for longer. So we can push more hang time on slate. If it had been on limestone, we would have chosen differently."
The block they chose, Block 18, was planted in 1979 by Peter Barry's father — the grandfather's block, as Sam calls it. Two hectares that the Barry brothers had already identified, separately, as having the same potential as Florita. They had been bottling wine from it under a Spring Farm label since 2013. When Loosen asked his question, the answer was already clear.
Hang time, as Sam describes it, moves the flavour up a spectrum: from citrus at the lower end, through stone fruit, into a more complex aromatic profile. It is not about sugar accumulation. It is about what happens to the character of the fruit when you give it more time. And on slate, with the acidity held firm, you can push further before the structure collapses.
Loosen's instruction at harvest was simple: whenever the Barrys thought the vineyard was ready, wait another couple of days. Not because the numbers demanded it, but because the structure that comes from those extra days cannot be replicated in the cellar afterwards.
The Barrel, the Yeast, and the Cork Negotiation
The next production process, by Sam Barry's account, was notably uncomplicated. Press into stainless, settle overnight, rack the cloudy juice into the barrel, and let the wild fermentation run its course. The challenge was not the fermentation itself. It was knowing when to stop it.
The target was around five or six grams of residual sugar — more than Clare Valley convention, less than a German GG. The reasoning is both chemical and perceptual. In Clare Valley, the acidity composition is different from the Mosel: more tartaric, less malic. In Germany, the higher malic acidity balances sugar more effectively, which is why German dry wines can carry eight or nine grams and taste dry. In Clare, the same amount reads differently.
"Our Florita is at about three grams of sugar. Erni's GGs are at nine grams. And they taste comparatively the same amount of dryness."
The role of the barrel after fermentation is structural. In a 2,700-litre Fuder, there is natural convection. The fine lees stay in suspension rather than settling to the bottom. That lees, as Loosen notes, scavenges the oxygen coming through the staves and keeps the wine in a slightly reductive environment. No bâtonnage. No active management. Just time.
"Yeast is a great, great tool. You don't need any fining agents. My grandfather always said — yeast is the best fining agent. And it is natural."
The wine then rests on fine lees in stainless steel for a further month before bottling. The 2016 vintage, made this way, was not released until 2026 — ten years after the grapes were picked.
There was one significant disagreement along the way, which Loosen recounts with evident pleasure. The original plan was to bottle under cork. Loosen sent over bottles and corks. Peter Barry phoned him to push back. Three days later, Tom Barry phoned. Three days after that, with the bottling two days away, they conceded — but told Loosen they already had screwcap bottles sorted.
"First Peter phoned. Then his son phoned three days later. I said, in two days it's the bottling — how do you want to get bottles and screwcaps now? He said, oh, don't worry, we already have them."
Loosen is not entirely happy about it. He believes in both closures. But he understands the market reality, and the screw cap argument has a technical dimension too: these wines, long on lees and with some residual sugar, carry phenolic structure that benefits from the more controlled oxygen ingress of screwcap.
The Wines in the Glass
2015 Jim Barry 'The Florita' Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia
Alc12.4% | TA 8.1g/L | pH 2.9 | Drink by 2045 | 97pts James Suckling (Ryan Montgomery)
The reference point for the tasting — not for the LoosenBarry style, but for where Clare Valley Riesling goes with time. Ten years in a bottle. The technical sheet describes gunsmoke, struck match, preserved lemons and lime leaves on the nose; the palate is medium-bodied with a phenolic edge, bright acidity and a mouthwatering mineral finish. Suckling's reviewer calls it still youthful despite a decade in the bottle. The palate is ripe and full, with red apple, stone fruit, apple skin and dried mango — acidity keeping everything in motion. It does not simplify with age. It broadens. Held back ten years for late cellar release. Drink now or hold.
2016 LoosenBarry 'Wolta Wolta' Dry Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia
Alc 12.9%|TA 7.3g/L|pH 3.0|RS ~5g/L|Drink by 2046
The inaugural vintage. Five tonnes from Block 18, picked 3rd March 2016 — the first fruit to go into the Fuder barrel. Wild fermentation arrested at five grams of residual sugar, then two years on full lees in barrel, one year in stainless, and a further period in bottle. Released publicly for the first time in 2026. Currently in what Loosen calls the sleeping phase: closed, mineral-framed, slow to give anything away. The 2012 GGR shows where this goes. Do not open early.
2017 LoosenBarry 'Wolta Wolta' Dry Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia
Alc 12.3%|TA 6.3g/L|pH 3.07|RS ~6g/L|Drink by 2050
Picked 17th March — two weeks later than the 2016, in a cooler vintage with more natural hang time. The most accessible of the LoosenBarry vintages tasted and, for Loosen, the purest expression of what the cool-year style produces: more aromatic precision, more clarity of structure. Released in 2020, while 2016 was already in its sleeping phase. The best way into the project for anyone who wants to understand the logic without waiting a decade.
2018 LoosenBarry 'Wolta Wolta' Dry Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia
Alc ~12.5%|RS ~6g/L
A warmer year, comparable to 2016. Sam Barry would drink this before the 2017 right now — it has opened into that extract-sweetness the warmer vintages develop, the fruit fully integrated and generous. A wine at a beautiful point. 2019, by comparison, is still holding back.
2019 LoosenBarry 'Wolta Wolta' Dry Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia
Alc 12.3%|TA 6.3g/L|pH 3.07|RS ~5g/L|Drink by 2050|97 pts Halliday
In a reductive phase, flinty, smoky, the fruit still held back behind structure. Comparatively dry and phenolic at this moment relative to 2018. Not a problem; 2016 showed the same pattern and came through it. Sam Barry thinks it will take 3 to 4 years to reach where 2018 is now. The reduction is actually a good sign: it will keep the wine fresh. Loosen: 'The 19 is just coming out of its sleep.'
2020 LoosenBarry 'Wolta Wolta' Dry Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia
Alc 11.75%|Drink by 2030
Warmer vintage, clean and precise. More linear than the others — but the line holds.
2021 LoosenBarry 'Wolta Wolta' Dry Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia
Alc 12.0%|TA 7.68g/L|pH 3.03|Drink by 2031|97 pts Robert Parker (Erin Larkin)
The most expressive of the range at this moment. Lemon blossom, white flowers, preserved citrus. Texture arrives earlier than the other vintages; the wine is more immediately generous. A transition vintage — slightly cooler than 2019 and 2020, similar to 2018. Will close before it opens again. Worth watching.
2023 LoosenBarry 'Wolta Wolta' Dry Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia
Picked 20th March — the latest harvest date in the project's history
The coolest vintage since 2002 in Clare Valley. Three La Niña years in a row — 2021, 2022, 2023 — after three dry El Niño years. 2023 is the outlier. Picked three weeks later than 2022. More phenolic development, greater concentration, what Sam Barry describes as blue fruit — cassis — a character he associates with cool Mosel vintages and had never seen in Clare before. Far too young to assess properly. Potentially the best wine on the table in time.
2023 LoosenBarry 'Slate Hill' Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia — first vintage
RS ~8g/L|Wild fermented, two years on gross lees in stainless steel
The newer, more accessible tier of the collaboration — made from younger blocks on the same Wolta Wolta property, blocks planted in the 1980s and 90s rather than 1979. Wild fermented, but in stainless steel rather than a barrel, then left on gross lees for two years. Eight grams of residual sugar, more than the Wolta Wolta, and it carries them completely. The blue fruit character from the cool vintage is present here too. Loosen pushed the sugar target up from the Barrys' instinct of four to five grams: 'If you're going to have residual, have some residual.' The wine, he says, is absolutely flying in Australia.
2012 Dr. Loosen 'Unterst Pichter' GGR Ürziger Würzgarten
Mosel, Germany — ungrafted vines 100+ years old
Alc 12.9%|TA 7.4g/L|RS 8.7g/L|Drink by 2050
The destination. Selectively harvested from ungrafted parcels of Ürziger Würzgarten — the Spice Garden of Ürzig, a red volcanic slate amphitheatre on the Mosel, adjacent to the vineyards of Erden. Naturally fermented in traditional Fuder casks, 24 months on full lees, then 36 months in bottle before release. The site's exotic spiced earthiness is present but so fully integrated it barely announces itself. What dominates is the extract-sweetness Loosen describes: roundness, harmony, a sense of completeness. The wine against which everything else in this tasting has to be understood.
2019 Dr. Loosen 'Unterst Pichter' GGR Ürziger Würzgarten
Mosel, Germany — ungrafted vines 100+ years old
Alc 13%|TA 7.8g/L|RS 9.16g/L|Drink by 2030
Same site, same process. Seven years younger and it shows — more angular, more direct, the integration of the 2012 still ahead of it. Tasting these two back to back is the single most instructive moment in the entire range: the architecture is the same; the building is at a different stage. Minimum five years.
2024 Jim Barry 'The Florita' Riesling
Clare Valley, South Australia
Alc 12.4%|TA 7.4g/L|pH 2.92|Drink by 2034|96 pts Halliday
The counterpoint. Crystalline from the first second: white florals, orange rind, exotic lime, bath salts, wild lavender. Pure energy. Dried lime finish, a drive that does not relent. 96 points from Mike Bennie. Against the LoosenBarry range, it reads as the opposite intention: fully stated on opening, expressive now rather than later. Both are right. They are simply not trying to do the same thing.
What Sugar Is Actually Doing
The question comes up during the tasting: is the relationship between sugar and aroma biochemical, or is it just empirical observation?
You've said that sugar unlocks flavour. Is that a biochemical phenomenon?
"I think we all know that sugar is not only there for making wine sweeter — it can also increase aromatics. If you harvest your strawberries unripe, add sugar, and let them sit for two or three hours, they suddenly become very aromatic. Because sugar enhances aromatics. Alcohol too. But therefore we don't have much alcohol, so the sugar is, in our case, because we age so long, a tool to bring out the aromatics. If they're bone dry, the aromatics are not very prominent. But sugar definitely brings them out. I don't know the biochemical reason exactly. It's only by experience."
Forty-five years of experience, to be precise. And the Burgundy analogy that Loosen keeps returning to is the clearest version of the argument:
"Old Burgundies are dry — you know this. But if you have a 30 or 40-year-old Burgundy, a perfect Burgundy, they taste sweet. They have a sweet finish. No sugar in it. That is the extract, with age, which lets the wines become harmonious and round."
This is what the LoosenBarry project is chasing — not sweetness, not dryness, but a form of completeness that only time can build. The few grams of residual sugar are not the destination. They are the tool that makes the journey possible.
Where the Market Is Going
The price of a bottle of Bourgogne Rouge at a London restaurant came up in conversation the evening before this interview: £350. Not a Premier Cru or a Village. A Bourgogne. Loosen's view of Burgundy's pricing situation is not diplomatic.
"They didn't hear the bell yet. The prices are going down. There's a crisis. And they think they can increase prices. I said, at least I want the price from last year — they said no, 10%. I mean..."
This irritation is not disconnected from the LoosenBarry project. The void left by Burgundy's price trajectory is one of the clearest market opportunities for Riesling at the premium end — and Loosen is explicit about it.
LoosenBarry was the first Australian Riesling to exceed AUD 100. Sam Barry frames it as a deliberate act:
"Australian Riesling sat under this glass ceiling where all the other varieties had gone past in terms of price. You couldn't charge more than $60. We wanted to break that ceiling. Because Australian Riesling, particularly with age, will outperform any other variety — maybe with the exception of the great Hunter Valley Semillons. With age, it outperforms any other white variety by a long shot."
The Wolta Wolta is currently priced at around £60 in the UK. Historically, Loosen notes, it has been difficult for British consumers to spend more than £10 on a bottle of Australian wine as a category.
"Or £10 on a Riesling. That's already difficult."
But the broader picture is shifting. Sam Barry points to what is happening to the perception of the category across a generation:
"You have to consider that to change perception takes a generation. Sherry took 25 years — from the vicar's tipple to the premium aged Palo Cortado. Ribera's still somewhere in the middle of that conversion. Riesling is near the end of that journey. And the new generation has no hangups. On sweet, dry — it's very clear what the styles are."
The Asian market, however, is where the growth is most visible right now. Loosen describes what his estate has been seeing:
"In Asia — especially Greater China, but also Vietnam, Thailand, every country in Asia — we see especially the young people, more driven, in China more driven by female consumers. Young female consumers. They love this lighter style of Riesling. The heavy, high-alcohol, big rich red wines — it's not really there. For the last three years, we've doubled the sales in China. And it is mostly driven by the lighter style, more aromatic, easier to drink."
The dynamics vary by market. Japan has been a serious audience for premium Riesling for far longer than China — a trade and consumer base with patience for the kind of textural precision the LoosenBarry wines are built on. What is shifting there is less appetite than price conversation: the willingness to pay seriously for serious Riesling is becoming less exceptional. Singapore operates differently again — less a destination than a gateway and a bellwether for Southeast Asia broadly. What moves in Singapore tends to signal what is coming across the wider region.
The export figures for Australian Riesling, as shared during the tasting by a Wine Australia representative, put total global value at AUD 15.1 million across 2.7 million litres. The volume-to-value ratio tells the story: commodity wine going into China is pulling the average value down, while wines like the Florita and the Wolta Wolta are pulling it up. Jim Barry's own export mix is moving in the right direction.
The Burgundy project — still in its early stages, started in 2022 — is partly a response to the same opportunity. Loosen describes working as a négociant, buying grapes or freshly pressed juice and doing the élevage, applying the same long lees contact logic to Chardonnay that has defined his Riesling work. Asked whether Burgundy producers are difficult to work with:
"These people are not easy. They're definitely a different breed. Americans, Australians — much easier. New World people are much easier. Oh God."
What the New World Taught Him
When you expanded to Oregon and Washington — and now Burgundy — did those projects teach you something, or was it always about what you could bring to them?
The answer is direct and goes against the expected direction.
"When I started in Washington State with Chateau Ste. Michelle, in '99, I was faced with a climate I'd never experienced. Eastern Washington is a desert. No rain at all. 3,500 sunshine hours a year. We have 1,100. So you're faced with warm vintages every year."
What he had to find was the equivalent of what he looks for everywhere: ways to extend hang time. Higher elevation, north-facing slopes, and even slightly higher yields to slow ripening. And when 2003 brought the first extremely hot summer Germany had experienced in decades, he knew exactly what to do — because he had already learned it in Washington.
"I said, okay, let's do what we do there — here too. And that was great. We had wonderful, higher acidity than everybody else, no over-ripeness. So you can learn from the New World too. It's not always the other way around."
He is sharp about what happens when producers go in the other direction — bringing Old World assumptions to New World conditions without listening. He mentions the early history of Pinot Noir in Oregon: European producers arriving, planting at 10,000 vines per hectare as they would in Burgundy, and then spending ten years working out why it did not work — before eventually learning from the Oregonians who had been there for fifteen years.
"You can't do the same thing from the Old World in the New World and expect it to show them how to make great wine. Completely failed. And now they had to learn from the local people."
The same principle guides LoosenBarry. He did not go to Clare Valley to demonstrate the Mosel method. He went to find the site that could support a version of the thinking, and then to listen to what the Barrys already knew about it.
What the Wines Are Actually Saying
By the end of the tasting, the question of what the LoosenBarry project means has largely answered itself. The wines do the argument.
They do not move in a straight line. The 2016 is closed and years away from showing fully. 2017 is the most generous right now. 2018 is at a beautiful point. 2019 is in a reductive phase that will resolve. 2023 has barely started. Against all of them, the 2012 Ürziger Würzgarten GGR sits as the destination: integrated, rounded, carrying that extract-derived completeness that has nothing to do with sugar and everything to do with time.
Sam Barry notes that the collaboration has changed how the entire Jim Barry winery thinks about winemaking. They are now putting a separate portion of Florita into a 3,000-litre barrel each year — a perpetual blend going back to 2021, building a timepiece of how that vineyard evolves over decades. They are applying lees ageing to other varieties. They are buying more large barrels every year, seasoning them slowly before use. None of this was on the table before Loosen arrived with a 2,700-litre Fuder on Valentine's Day 2016.
"We wouldn't have been thinking that way before this project. It's opened our thinking up a huge amount."
Loosen ends the conversation the way he ends most conversations — with a combination of bluntness, warmth and an anecdote that somehow captures the whole thing. He talks about the 2023 vintage being far too young, and about the instinct in the market to drink everything immediately:
"Sure, it's beautiful, it's fresh — you can see where this wine can go. But then you have to wait. My grandfather always said you shouldn't touch them before they're minimum 10 or 15 years old. People are missing something. Where this wine can go — if you taste the 2012, that is barely where it goes."
He is not arguing for patience as an aesthetic position. He is arguing for it as the only way to understand what the wine actually is. The LoosenBarry project, at its core, is an invitation to have that argument seriously — about Riesling, about Australia, and about what a fine wine category looks like when it stops apologising for itself.
