The Quality Pyramid

German Wine · Foundations

What you will be able to do

Define a degree Oechsle and explain why German law no longer contains a conversion to alcohol
Name the six Prädikate in order and state the one condition every Prädikatswein must meet
Explain why the Oechsle minimums are regional rather than national, and quote the spread
Apply the trocken and halbtrocken thresholds, including the acidity derogation
Distinguish statutory Grosses Gewächs from VDP.GROSSES GEWÄCHS on every point where they differ

A German label has to answer two questions that most wine countries fold into one. How ripe were the grapes, and where exactly did they come from? Germany answers them with two separate ladders, and since 2021 both are in the statute book at the same time. Then there is a third ladder, older than the current law and stricter than it, run by a private association that has no legal power at all. Get those three straight and German labelling stops being difficult.

Must weight, and the scale that measures it

Everything on the ripeness ladder is decided at the weighbridge, before fermentation, by a single measurement.

One degree Oechsle (ERK-sluh, written °Oe) is the number of grams by which one litre of grape must at 20 degrees Celsius is heavier than one litre of water. Must weighing 1,084 grams per litre is 84 °Oe. The scale is therefore a direct restatement of specific gravity: °Oe equals (specific gravity minus 1) multiplied by 1000. It is named for Ferdinand Oechsle, 1774 to 1852, a Pforzheim goldsmith who built the hydrometer in the 1830s. The German term for what it measures is Mostgewicht (MOST-guh-vikht), must weight.

Note carefully what it does not measure. Oechsle reads total dissolved solids, of which roughly 90 percent in ripe must is sugar and the rest is acids, minerals, pectins and phenolics. That is why two musts at the same °Oe can ferment to slightly different alcohols, and why the scale is best understood as a proxy for ripeness rather than as a sugar assay.

There is no longer any legally binding conversion from Oechsle to alcohol in German law. Weinverordnung section 17, which carried the official conversion, and its Anlage 8 table are both marked weggefallen, repealed, in the consolidated text. Federal law consequently expresses every alcohol floor in percent by volume and never in °Oe. The working rule of thumb is roughly 8 °Oe per 1 percent by volume, so 80 °Oe is about 10 percent, but some German texts divide by 7.0 to 7.5 instead. Quote it as a rule of thumb. Do not quote it as law.

Scale	Used in	What it measures	Relation to Oechsle
Oechsle (°Oe)	Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland	grams per litre above water	reference
KMW (°KMW, Klosterneuburger Mostwaage)	Austria, South Tyrol	grams of sugar per 100 g of must	°Oe = KMW x (4.54 + 0.022 x KMW), roughly 1 to 5
Brix (°Bx)	USA, Australia, New Zealand	grams of sucrose per 100 g of solution	°Bx is roughly °Oe divided by 5, a rule of thumb that loosens as ripeness rises
Baumé (°Bé)	France, Spain	designed so 1 °Bé is about 1 percent potential alcohol	1 °KMW is about 0.65 °Bé

The KMW formula is exact as published, not an approximation, and the multiplier rises with ripeness: 4.87 at 15 °KMW, 5.09 at 25 °KMW. The reason Oechsle numbers look so much bigger than Brix numbers is that Brix and KMW are weight-of-sugar measures while Oechsle is a density measure. A must weight in the nineties on the Oechsle scale sounds enormous beside a Brix reading in the low twenties. They are the same must.

The six Prädikate

A Prädikat (pray-dee-KAHT) is a ripeness designation, awarded on minimum must weight and nothing else. In ascending order:

1. Kabinett (ka-bee-NET) 2. Spätlese (SHPAYT-lay-zuh), late harvest 3. Auslese (OWSS-lay-zuh), selected harvest 4. Beerenauslese (BAY-ren-owss-lay-zuh), selected berry harvest, BA 5. Eiswein (ICE-vine), ice wine 6. Trockenbeerenauslese (TROCK-en-bay-ren-owss-lay-zuh), dry selected berry harvest, TBA

Eiswein is placed fifth by convention, but it has no must weight of its own. It requires the same minimum as Beerenauslese. What distinguishes it is that the concentration must come from water freezing out on the vine rather than from botrytis or raisining.

The conditions live in Weingesetz section 20, not in sections 2, 3, 17 or 22 where people usually look for them.

Prädikat	The statutory condition, closely paraphrased
Kabinett	fully ripe grapes from the normal harvest, and no enrichment
Spätlese	grapes harvested in a spätere Lese, a later harvest, and fully ripe
Auslese	made from nur vollreife oder edelfaule Weintrauben, only fully ripe or nobly rotten grapes
Beerenauslese	made from overripe or nobly rotten single berries
Eiswein	the grapes were bei ihrer Lese und Kelterung gefroren, frozen at harvest and at pressing
Trockenbeerenauslese	made from nobly rotten or at least naturally shrivelled berries

Two things the statute does not say are worth as much as the things it does. It fixes no calendar date for a Spätlese, only a later harvest than the main one. And the definition of Auslese contains no sorting instruction at all. The familiar line that unripe berries are picked out is the German Wine Institute's gloss on the practice, not a legal requirement.

Likewise, the statute specifies no temperature for Eiswein. It says only that the grapes must be frozen when picked and when pressed. The famous minus 7 degrees Celsius is the German Wine Institute's practical standard, and it is the expected exam answer, but you should know it is not in the federal text.

The minimums are regional, not national

This is the part that almost every English-language summary gets wrong.

Weingesetz section 17 paragraph 3 delegates the minimum natural alcohol to the Landesregierungen, the state governments, and expressly permits them to differentiate by Anbaugebiet, by Bereich, by Grosslage, by Einzellage and by grape variety. The detail then appears in each region's Produktspezifikation (pro-DOOKT-shpeh-tsi-fi-ka-tsee-OHN), the product specification for its protected designation of origin, published and maintained by the federal agriculture agency, the BLE. Those documents, not the Weingesetz, are where the Oechsle numbers live.

So the chain runs: federal law sets a percent-by-volume floor and delegates the rest; the regions set °Oe minimums per variety; and because the federal conversion table was repealed, there is no longer even an arithmetic bridge between the two. A single national Oechsle table is a fiction.

Riesling, where the specification names it, otherwise the row that covers Riesling:

Region	Qualitätswein	Kabinett	Spätlese	Auslese	BA	TBA
Mosel	55	73	80	88	110	150
Mittelrhein	55	76	85	93	110	150
Ahr †	55	76	80	88	110	150
Nahe	57	73	78	85	120	150
Rheingau †	57	75	85	95	125	150
Rheinhessen	60	73	85	92	120	150
Pfalz	60	73	85	92	120	150
Baden, Kaiserstuhl group	63	76	86	102	128	154

† For the Ahr and the Rheingau, the federal register still publishes the pre-2013 generation of the document, drafted under Regulation (EC) 1234/2007, with the tables at section 5.1 rather than 3.2. The figures above are what those documents say. Treat them as slightly less settled than the other six.

Three things fall out of it.

The Qualitätswein floor rises south in four clean steps: 55, 57, 60, 63. That one is exactly as intuition predicts.

Kabinett does not follow that gradient. Mosel, Nahe, Rheinhessen and Pfalz all sit at 73, while Mittelrhein and Ahr, both cooler than Rheinhessen, sit at 76. Kabinett is set by regional tradition, not by latitude. The Nahe makes the point sharper still: its Riesling Auslese minimum is 85 °Oe, three degrees below the Mosel's 88, so the warmer region sets the lower bar.

Beerenauslese spreads by eighteen degrees, from 110 in the Mosel, Mittelrhein and Ahr, through 120 on the Nahe and in Rheinhessen and the Pfalz, to 125 in the Rheingau and 128 in warm Baden. Two bottles, the same word on both labels, and materially different fruit behind them.

Two regions break the format outright. Franken states its minimums in percent by volume with no Oechsle column anywhere in the document, one number per tier and no variety splits at all: Kabinett 11.0, Spätlese 12.0, Auslese 13.8, Beerenauslese 16.8, Trockenbeerenauslese 19.6. Compare like with like and a Franken Kabinett, at 11.0 percent, must be riper than a Mosel Spätlese at 10.6. And Baden splits its minimums geographically, between the Bereiche Markgräflerland, Tuniberg, Kaiserstuhl, Breisgau, Ortenau, Kraichgau and Badische Bergstrasse on one side, and the two cool outliers Bodensee and Tauberfranken on the other. It is the only region that subdivides itself this way.

Sweetness on the label

A Prädikat tells you about ripeness at harvest. It tells you nothing about how sweet the wine finished. A Spätlese can be bone dry. For sweetness there are four separate legal terms, keyed to Restsüsse (REST-zew-suh), residual sugar, in grams per litre. The thresholds are EU law, at Annex III Part B of Regulation 2019/33 as replaced in full by Regulation 2023/1606.

Term	Pronunciation	Residual sugar
trocken, dry	TROCK-en	maximum 4 g/l, or up to 9 g/l with the acidity derogation
halbtrocken, off-dry	HALP-trock-en	maximum 12 g/l, or up to 18 g/l with the acidity derogation
lieblich, medium sweet	LEEP-likh	above the halbtrocken limit, to a maximum of 45 g/l
süss, sweet	ZEWSS	45 g/l and above

The trocken derogation is the one that gets mangled, so state it exactly: a wine may be labelled trocken with up to 9 g/l of sugar only if the total acidity, as tartaric acid, is no more than 2 g/l below the residual sugar. In other words, sugar minus acidity must be 2 or less, and the sugar must not exceed 9.

9 g/l sugar, 7 g/l acidity. Difference 2. Trocken.
9 g/l sugar, 6 g/l acidity. Difference 3. Not trocken.
8 g/l sugar, 6 g/l acidity. Difference 2. Trocken.
4 g/l sugar, 3 g/l acidity. Trocken under the flat limit, whatever the acidity.

The halbtrocken derogation runs the same way with different constants: up to 18 g/l where sugar minus acidity is 10 or less. The rationale for both is sensory. Acidity masks sugar, so a high-acid Riesling at 9 g/l genuinely tastes dry where a low-acid wine at the same figure does not. Note that the derogation is EU-wide rather than German, so a Chablis labelled sec faces exactly the same pair of limits. What differs is that Riesling routinely brings the acidity needed to unlock the 9 g/l ceiling, where a lower-acid wine such as a Silvaner at the same sugar level does not, and reverts to the flat 4 g/l.

Then there is feinherb (FINE-hairp), finely tart, which appears on a great many Mosel labels and which is not one of the four regulated taste designations. No statutory or regulatory provision names it or fixes a sugar range for it. It is a permitted free description rather than a Geschmacksangabe. In practice it covers roughly the halbtrocken to lower-lieblich band, and producers use it because halbtrocken acquired a downmarket reputation in the German market in the 1980s and 1990s. It tells you about the producer's intent. It guarantees nothing.

The origin ladder, in force since the 2026 vintage

The 2021 amendment to the Weingesetz, in force since 27 January 2021, added a second ladder built on origin rather than ripeness, on the principle that the narrower the stated origin, the higher the tier.

1. Deutscher Wein, no geographical indication beyond the country 2. Landwein, a protected geographical indication 3. Anbaugebiet, one of the thirteen, a protected designation of origin 4. Region, a sub-area within an Anbaugebiet 5. Ort, village wine, Ortswein 6. Einzellage, single vineyard, within which sit Erstes Gewächs (AIR-stess guh-VEKS) and Grosses Gewächs (GROH-suss guh-VEKS)

The transition is now over. Erste and Grosse Gewächse could be labelled under the old rules up to and including the 2023 vintage, all other quality and Prädikat wines up to and including 2025, and stock already bottled may be sold until it runs out. From the 2026 vintage the new rules are binding. That means the ladder above is current law for the harvest now coming in, and the older labelling you still see on shelf is legacy stock.

The two top tiers carry real conditions:

	Erstes Gewächs	Grosses Gewächs
Origin	one Einzellage or smaller	one Einzellage or smaller
Yield	60 hl/ha, 70 on steep slopes	50 hl/ha, 60 on steep slopes
Minimum natural alcohol	11 percent by volume	11 percent by volume
Style	dry	dry
Harvest	selective harvest	hand harvest
Examination	statutory examination	statutory examination plus sensory assessment
Prädikat	not permitted	not permitted
Earliest release	1 March of the following year	white 1 September of the following year, red 1 June of the second year

The 11 percent figure does not sit in the body of the Weinverordnung. Section 39 authorises each Produktspezifikation to impose requirements stricter than the statutory single-vineyard minimum, and the specifications are where the figure is actually written. Franken's, for instance, states 11.0 Vol.-% for Erstes Gewächs in as many words, alongside a separate minimum of 9.8 percent for wines sold in the Bocksbeutel (BOCKS-boy-tuhl), the bottle shape associated with Franken. That is worth knowing on its own account: the Bocksbeutel is not merely a bottle shape, it is a legal category with a higher ripeness floor than ordinary Franken Qualitätswein.

Three different things share the name, and conflating them is a classic error. There was a Rheingau-only Erstes Gewächs scheme for Riesling and Spätburgunder, created by Hessian ordinance in the mid 1990s, which is gone. The repealing instrument is not in the sources used here, so treat the end date as unsettled. There is the statutory Erstes Gewächs described above, which applies nationally and is very much alive. And there is the VDP's Erste Lage (AIR-stuh LAH-guh), first site, which is a private classification of a site rather than a designation on a wine. Erstes Gewächs was superseded in the Rheingau. The term itself was never retired.

The VDP, a private ladder that predates the law

The Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter, the Association of German Prädikat Wine Estates, was founded on 26 November 1910 as the Verband Deutscher Naturweinversteigerer, when four regional auction associations merged. The oldest of the four was the Rheingau's, founded in 1897. The initiative came from the mayor of Trier, Albert von Bruchhausen, who became the first chairman. The body took its present name in 1972, when Naturwein gave way to Prädikatswein in the law.

As at 2023 it had 201 member estates farming 5,588 hectares, about 5.5 percent of the German vineyard. Membership is by invitation, subject to periodic re-inspection, and estates have been removed. Its own German classification page says the position plainly: the VDP classification has no status in wine law and rests on the association's private rules. A member must comply with the Weingesetz in full, and everything the VDP adds sits on top.

The four-tier classification, in force from the 2012 vintage, is explicitly Burgundian in inspiration: it classifies the site, not the must weight.

Tier	Origin	Yield cap	Release
VDP.GUTSWEIN	the estate	75 hl/ha	no restriction
VDP.ORTSWEIN	one village	75 hl/ha	not before 1 March of the following year
VDP.ERSTE LAGE	a classified first-class site	60 hl/ha	from the VDP.Weinbörse at the end of April
VDP.GROSSE LAGE	a classified top site	50 hl/ha	dry white from 1 September of the year after the harvest, dry red from 1 September of the year after that

The upper tier is Grosse Lage (GROH-suh LAH-guh), great site.

Gutswein and Ortswein require at least 80 percent traditional, region-typical varieties, with the list of which varieties qualify set by each regional association rather than nationally. Erste Lage and Grosse Lage both require hand harvest, selective picking and a sensory examination by the association on top of the statutory Amtliche Prüfung (AHMT-likh-uh PREW-foong).

On ripeness the VDP says only that the grapes must be physiologically fully ripe. It publishes no Oechsle threshold for any tier, on its classification pages or in its classification flyers. Secondary sources circulate figures. Treat them as unsourced until the association publishes one.

Every classified site is listed with its boundary in VDP.Weinberg.Online, the association's public vineyard register, which is why VDP site delimitation is checkable in a way that statutory Einzellage boundaries frequently are not.

The Traubenadler (TROW-ben-ahd-ler), the grape eagle, was registered as the association's logo on 10 March 1926 and is embossed on the capsule of every member's bottle. It denotes membership, not tier. A VDP.Gutswein and a VDP.GROSSES GEWÄCHS carry the same eagle.

Grosses Gewächs is not a fifth tier

A VDP.GROSSE LAGE site produces two lines of wine. The dry wine is the VDP.GROSSES GEWÄCHS. The sweet wines carry the classical Prädikate in the traditional way. Grosses Gewächs is therefore not a rank above Grosse Lage; it is what the dry wine from a Grosse Lage is called.

A GG never carries a Prädikat, and that is deliberate. Origin labels the dry wine; ripeness labels the sweet one. The same logic explains a rule that catches people out: since the 2012 vintage a VDP member may not release a dry Kabinett, or a dry Spätlese. The classical Prädikate are reserved for wines with residual sweetness, and in the dry line at every tier below Grosse Lage the wine is labelled simply as Qualitätswein. This is an association rule enforced through membership, with no counterpart in law. A producer who left the VDP could make a dry Kabinett perfectly legally the next morning.

Where this goes next

You now have both ladders and the private one that runs beside them. What you do not yet have is the vocabulary of the bottle itself: what the A.P. Nr. encodes, how a Grosslage name can wear a famous vineyard's clothes, and how to read a label top to bottom without being misdirected. That is the next lesson. After it, the course leaves the law behind and goes to the Nahe, where the soil changes every few hundred metres and the classification arguments become concrete.

Glossary

Mostgewicht: MOST-guh-vikht Must weight. The dissolved solids content of grape must, measured in Germany in degrees Oechsle. It is the legal measure of ripeness at harvest.
Oechsle: ERK-sluh The German must weight scale. One degree is the number of grams by which a litre of must at 20 degrees Celsius exceeds a litre of water. Named for Ferdinand Oechsle, 1774 to 1852, a Pforzheim goldsmith who built the hydrometer in the 1830s.
Prädikat: pray-dee-KAHT A ripeness designation awarded on minimum must weight, one of six. Since the 2021 reform it sits alongside the origin ladder rather than inside it.
Prädikatswein: pray-dee-KAHTS-vine A quality wine bearing one of the six Prädikate. Enrichment is prohibited, by Weingesetz section 20 paragraph 3 for Kabinett and by paragraph 4 for the other five.
Kabinett: ka-bee-NET The first Prädikat. Fully ripe grapes from the normal harvest, no enrichment, lightest in body. The name comes from the Kabinettkeller at Kloster Eberbach.
Spätlese: SHPAYT-lay-zuh Late harvest. The second Prädikat. Grapes picked in a later harvest than the main one, at a higher must weight. Not necessarily sweet.
Auslese: OWSS-lay-zuh Selected harvest. The third Prädikat. The statute requires only fully ripe or nobly rotten grapes. It contains no sorting instruction, despite the familiar gloss.
Beerenauslese: BAY-ren-owss-lay-zuh Selected berry harvest. Overripe or botrytised individual berries. Hand harvest is compulsory. Minimum actual alcohol 5.5 percent by volume.
Trockenbeerenauslese: TROCK-en-bay-ren-owss-lay-zuh Dry selected berry harvest. Shrivelled, usually botrytised berries, and the highest must weight of the six. Hand harvest is compulsory.
Eiswein: ICE-vine Wine from grapes frozen on the vine and pressed while still frozen. It carries the same minimum must weight as Beerenauslese and has none of its own. The statute sets no temperature.
Anreicherung: AHN-rye-khuh-roong Enrichment, that is chaptalisation, the addition of sugar to must to raise the finished alcohol. Permitted for Qualitätswein within EU limits and prohibited for every Prädikatswein.
Restsüsse: REST-zew-suh Residual sugar, the sugar left in the wine after fermentation, in grams per litre. The basis of the four legal taste designations.
trocken: TROCK-en Dry. Maximum 4 g/l residual sugar, or up to 9 g/l where the total acidity as tartaric acid is no more than 2 g/l below the sugar.
halbtrocken: HALP-trock-en Off-dry. Maximum 12 g/l, or up to 18 g/l where the sugar exceeds the acidity by no more than 10 g/l.
feinherb: FINE-hairp Finely tart. A widely used but legally undefined term, roughly the halbtrocken to lower-lieblich band. It carries no guaranteed sugar level and is the one German sweetness word on a label that promises nothing.
Produktspezifikation: pro-DOOKT-shpeh-tsi-fi-ka-tsee-OHN The product specification for a protected designation of origin, published by the BLE. It carries the must weight minimums, yields and permitted varieties for each of the thirteen regions.
Grosse Lage: GROH-suh LAH-guh The VDP's top tier, a classified top site, capped at 50 hl/ha. Written Große Lage in German. The dry wine from such a site is the VDP.GROSSES GEWÄCHS.
Erste Lage: AIR-stuh LAH-guh The VDP's third tier, a classified first-class site, capped at 60 hl/ha. Distinct from the statutory Erstes Gewächs, which is a different thing under a similar name.
Grosses Gewächs: GROH-suss guh-VEKS Great growth. A dry single-vineyard wine from a top site. It exists in two parallel systems, the VDP's private classification since the 2012 vintage and German wine law since the 2021 reform, with the VDP the stricter. It never carries a Prädikat.
Erstes Gewächs: AIR-stess guh-VEKS First growth. Since 2021 a statutory tier below Grosses Gewächs, capped at 60 hl/ha and 70 on steep slopes. Franken's product specification carries it as a named category with a minimum of 11.0 percent by volume.
Traubenadler: TROW-ben-ahd-ler The VDP grape eagle, registered as the association's logo on 10 March 1926. It appears embossed on member capsules and denotes membership of the association, not the tier of the wine.
Hochgewächs: HOKH-guh-veks A Riesling Qualitätswein whose natural alcohol is at least 1.5 percentage points above the regional minimum and which scores at least 3.0 in the official examination. Weinverordnung section 34 paragraph 1.
Amtliche Prüfung: AHMT-likh-uh PREW-foong The official state examination, chemical and sensory, that every German quality wine must pass. It yields the A.P. Nr. printed on the label.