The Future Is East: Björn Probst on Saxony, Goldriesling & Cool Climate Winemaking

Getting to Saxony took three attempts. The harvest kept intervening. When Jan Eggers finally arrived at VDP. Weingut Schloß Proschwitz in mid-September, head winemaker Björn Probst was already deep in picking. More than thirty percent of the vineyards were already in the cellar, the rest still waiting on the vine at 51° north — one of the most northerly wine estates in Germany.

They settled on the estate, the granite terraces falling away below them toward the Elbe, the river glittering in the September light with Dresden somewhere in the distance. Probst had a glass of Goldriesling ready. It is a variety so rare it barely exists outside this valley, and he had strong views about what it deserved to be.

He had been meaning to do this interview for months. He was glad, he said, that it had finally happened. Then he poured the wine and started talking.

A Mountain Hut, a Tasting, and a Career

Björn Probst did not arrive at winemaking by the most direct route. Ask him what he would do if he were not making wine, and the answer arrives without hesitation: run a mountain hut somewhere in Austria. Good food, good wine list, hikers arriving hungry from the trail. He is, he says, convinced he would be an excellent Hüttenwirt.

The winemaking path ran through a series of estates and institutions — training in Heilbronn, a year at a Rheinhessen estate, studies at Geisenheim, a period in Switzerland, and then a second degree in organic agriculture at the University of Witzenhausen that would prove formative in ways he was not yet aware of. But the moment that crystallised his direction came not in a classroom or a cellar, but over a glass.

The wine was from Domaine Zind-Humbrecht in Alsace. What struck him was not the complexity or the pedigree, but something more elemental: you could taste the soil in every glass. "You can always taste the soil on Humbrecht's wines. That's really great." It is a formative reference point that would shape everything that followed, including his conviction that the granite soils and cool microclimate of Saxony, properly understood and farmed, could produce wines of genuine depth.

Goldriesling and the Varieties Nobody Else Has

VDP. Weingut Schloß Proschwitz was founded in 1990, when the estate bought back six hectares of vineyard on this slope. It has grown steadily since: 75 hectares today, VDP member since 1996, and fully certified organic as of last year.

Among the varieties grown here, one stands apart. Goldriesling is a crossing that barely exists outside Saxony, a grape that most producers elsewhere have abandoned as too modest, too simple, too difficult to sell. Proschwitz makes more than 40,000 bottles of it per year, and Probst has strong views about what it is capable of.

The Goldriesling poured at the start of the interview was a 2023 vintage, made with an initial selective pick followed by a return to the vine more than two weeks later. It was oily, complex and herbal, with a grapefruit bitterness that lingered. It was not a basic wine. It was a food wine with a structure that will develop over years, and a compelling argument for the variety's potential in the right hands.

Granite teraces are a typical picture in the wine growing region Saxony.

Organic Farming in Five Years of Drought

The organic certification that Proschwitz completed last year was years in the making, and it coincided with one of the most challenging runs of growing seasons the estate has experienced. Five consecutive years without meaningful rain between May and August. A continental climate that is becoming increasingly extreme. Last year, a late frost that cut the crop significantly.

The comparison he reaches for is Burgundy: the same dry summers, the same anxious watching of the sky. In 2025, the first meaningful midsummer rain in five years arrived in mid-July. It was the exception, not the rule.

His response has been to work the soil. More than fifty different seed varieties are planted between vine rows: garlic, herbs, plants chosen to build organic matter, retain moisture and encourage life. Young vines are irrigated for their first two or three years, a pragmatic concession to survival, before being left to find their own depth. The organic certification is not the end of the process but the beginning of a longer one.

The Future Is East

Saxony and Saale-Unstrut together account for around 1,500 hectares of vineyard, roughly 1.5 percent of Germany's total. The wine world, for the most part, has not been paying attention. Probst thinks this is about to change, and that the reasons are already visible in the data.

While producers elsewhere in Germany are finishing their picking, Saxony is still watching the vines. The latitude that once seemed like a disadvantage is becoming, in a warming climate, an asset. He is not alone in making this argument. The VDP East brings together six estates — VDP. Weingut Hey, VDP. Weingut Zimmerling, VDP. Weingut Martin Schwarz, VDP. Weingut Böhme & Töchter and VDP. Weingut Pawis — and they are increasingly visible at trade fairs and in international markets.

Five Years From Now

The second wine poured during the interview was the Weißburgunder GG, from vines visible just beyond the estate where they were sitting. It was the kind of wine that makes the argument more eloquently than any words: fresh, structured, mineral, with the acidity that Saxony's latitude provides and the depth that comes from old granite soils and careful farming. It will, Probst says, be at its best somewhere between 2028 and 2030.

Asked where he sees Schloß Proschwitz in five years, he is characteristically direct: among the best fifty large wineries in Germany, and better known for the Weißburgunder wines that he believes are the estate's future. For himself, he hopes to work a little less.

The harvest is not finished. There is still Riesling on the vine, and the forecast is holding. The Weißburgunder glass is empty now, and the Elbe moves below the terraces as it has moved below these terraces for a thousand years of winemaking — most of it forgotten, some of it being quietly rebuilt.