Riesling tends to live in the sommelier-and-food pairing corner. The grape that wine professionals gush over (reasonably so) and yet the grape that most mainstream drinkers walk past. That isn't what happened here. Georg Albrecht Schneider's Paterberg Riesling Kabinett, made by Ursula Muller & her husband Steffen, ranked #1 of 55 wines and posted the festival's highest Memorability score. Their Vom Kalk Riesling landed at #7. Regular NYC wine drinkers, when tasting blind, picked a small-production Riesling. Twice!

Ursula is the 9th generation of the Schneider family. She never planned to be a winemaker — she studied business administration, went to work at a pharmaceutical company, and only came back in 2011 when her siblings had no interest in taking over. She merged the estate with her husband Steffen's in 2015. Her favorite vineyard is the Hipping — she was there as a little girl when it was planted, and every harvest, the crew ends the season there with a meal in the field and a song together.

Guests valued the Paterberg at 66.7% more than its $18 retail — the single largest value overperformance in the festival. Great Riesling can have a reputation for being expensive, or inaccessible. But $18 for the #1 wine in a blind tasting of 55? That's gold. If there's one thing this festival proved about Riesling — and it proved a lot — it's that the grape's QPR can be truly unmatched.

We've recently noticed a trending storyline that Pinot Noir has been overdone — too popular for too long, too expensive — looking at you, Burgundy — and Gamay is the new Pinot Noir. (And no Gamay hate here, we love a Cru Bojo!) In certain wine circles, Pinot Noir is sometimes dismissed as too traditional, especially when obscure varietals and crunchy new reds are in the room.

So what does the actual data say? Are young wine drinkers tired of queen pinot? Well… maybe not. At least the festival data didn't read that way. Pinot Noir was the top-performing red grape across all wines (5 bottles, average rank 19.4). McCollum Heritage 91 was a particular stunner, landing at #10. So the results are in — people still love a great glass of Pinot.

And maybe the wider story is that people still love the classics. That tracks with what we saw at the festival. A New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc at #3, a Tuscan Sangiovese at #5, a Macon Chardonnay at #8. NWLB will keep championing the obscure grapes, the off-grid regions, the minimal-intervention bottles — but when the room tastes blind, sometimes the answer is the one wine writers stopped writing about because everyone already knew. There's a reason the classics are the classics.

There's a word that still makes certain wine drinkers flinch: sweet. Not syrupy, not cloying — just a wine that isn't bone dry. The style that quietly gets passed over for something more austere, more serious, more correct.

The top two wines at this festival were both off-dry. Georg Albrecht Schneider's Paterberg Riesling Kabinett at #1. Pine Ridge's Chenin Blanc + Viognier at #2.

The aversion to off-dry is a learned thing. And it's not completely off base — with lower quality wines, sweetness — residual sugar, sometimes from added concentrates — is used to mask real faults. Menus that treat "dry" as a proxy for quality. Wine culture that mistakes austere for serious. Strip that conditioning out of the room and the data gets pretty straightforward: people like balance, and they like fruit. A wine that meets you where you are tends to win.

And since when did seriousness become the goal? At NWLB, we look for quality wine with a good story — farming and winemaking that's respectful to the earth and to the people drinking it. But seriousness? Not part of the equation. We want playful. Two wines at the top of a 55-bottle blind tasting. Both off-dry. Make of that what you will.

Chinese wine has been building a case for itself for years — more of it on shelves, more of it on lists, and a conversation that's starting to shift. Silver Heights' The Last Warrior Red — an 80/20 Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot blend from Ningxia — ranked #13 of 55. In a blind tasting, NYC wine drinkers chose it over dozens of bottles from France, Spain, Italy, and the US. It's a classically-structured Bordeaux-style blend that feels immediately familiar, except it comes from a spot on the map most people couldn't point to on a good day.

Emma Gao, the winemaker behind Silver Heights, is one of the most compelling winemakers working anywhere in the world right now — and The Last Warrior is worth talking about not because it's Chinese wine, but because it's just really good wine. Plus, Silver Heights is also China's first Demeter-certified biodynamic winery.

The wine world is always shifting. Climate change, tariffs, trade pressures — they're reshaping what ends up on shelves and where it comes from. The next great wine region doesn't always announce itself. In this case, it just showed up at #13 out of 55, in a blind tasting, in the West Village.

46 of 55 wines at this festival were grown sustainably, organically, or biodynamically. The split: 21 organic, 20 sustainable, 5 biodynamic. Each certification carries its own weight, with different standards, different constraints, and different commitments to what goes into the ground and what stays out of it — and all of them speak to a standard of quality that shows up in the glass.

At NWLB, the wines we choose for our festivals reflect how we think about quality. Sustainable, organic, and biodynamic farming aren't checkboxes we screen for — they're values that show up consistently in the producers we're drawn to, because the care that goes into the vineyard tends to be the same care that goes into the bottle.