Vines have grown on this hill above the Rhine for around 1,200 years; the site first appears in a document dated 817. But the date that matters is 1720, when the estate was replanted entirely with Riesling. It was the first vineyard in the world given over to the grape alone, which makes this, quite literally, the birthplace of Riesling as we know it.

Then there's 1775. Every autumn a courier rode to Fulda to collect the abbot's permission to begin picking. That year he was weeks late. By the time he arrived the grapes had shrivelled and gone mouldy on the vine. They were picked anyway, out of desperation, and the wine turned out to be extraordinary. That accident gave the world Spätlese, and the estate still has a statue of the courier in its courtyard, probably the only monument anywhere to a man who turned up late.

Today the estate is around 50 hectares of pure Riesling on a steep, south-facing slope of quartzite. It remains one of the great names of German wine: precise, mineral, and built to age for decades.