After three days in Germany’s Mosel Valley this spring, I returned home with a new respect for the region’s wine and a polo shirt sporting a Generation Riesling logo. It’s about time the Mosel’s winemakers felt a bit of optimism. Once as exalted as Bordeaux and Burgundy and heralded by disciples as the best white on the planet, great German riesling can show amazingly tender yet vibrant acid-sugar-alcohol tension and opulent peach, apple and citrus fruit ripeness. But the grape lost its lustre in the 1980s and ’90s under the weight of too many poor quality bottlings and cheap knockoffs with names evoking blue nuns living in black towers. I wasn’t buying much riesling either, often disappointed with wines that were monochromatically sweet or too tart, or plagued by excessive sulphur preservative. Now, in the hands of a new generation of great Mosel winemakers, rieslings are finding fresh purity and balance. This becomes a fascinating taste exploration along the steep, vertigo-inducing banks of the serpentine Mosel River and its Saar and Ruwer tributaries, where dozens of pedigreed grand cru sites supply the grapes with slate soil–driven minerality. Dirk Richter of Weingut Max Ferdinand Richter, a family property making classic riesling since 1880, says the greatest of the recent improvements is that growers are now less concerned about getting sugar ripeness from the grapes and more focused on acidity at the time of harvest. So the wines are more balanced, and marry better with food than they once did. I drank riesling with every meal in the Mosel—from white asparagus to scallops, trout, pork tenderloin and grilled chicken in morel sauce—and it bestowed grace and refreshment, creating a clean canvas for each dish. Improved riesling is a global phenomenon, even right here in Ontario, but to see the transformation underway in the Mosel—its spiritual homeland—is cause for optimism indeed.