Ground and register
The site is Lage 460251, Gemeinde and Gemarkung Schoden, with 5.8 hectares under vine. The einzellagen layer WineSaint ships delimits 68.71 hectares in two parts, measured geodesically. Published planted figures count vines while the delimited figure counts ground, and the ratio here is the most informative number in the file: roughly one hectare in twelve of the delimited land actually carries a vine.
Terrain sampled across the polygon explains the rest. The ground runs from about 137 to 289 metres with a median gradient of 26 per cent and steep sections above 60, so this is genuine slope, not plateau. The aspect, however, is emphatically west to northwest across the entire delimited area, without a single south-facing sample. On the Saar's right bank the Herrenberg takes the afternoon and evening sun and gives up the morning, which in a valley where ripening is the perennial problem is a structural handicap rather than a stylistic quirk. What is planted is what still pays.
The Grosslage is Scharzberg, the blanket collective for the whole Saar.
Classification, neighbours and who works it
No parcel of the Schodener Herrenberg appears in the VDP's vineyard register. The village's classified ground is the Saarfeilser, entered by the VDP under Schoden and Biebelhausen with 4.87 hectares classified, a south-turned gravel and river-sediment slope at 73 per cent worked by Van Volxem, Peter Lauer and Nik Weis St. Urbans-Hof. It sits 830 metres north-northwest of the Herrenberg and points the other way.
Schoden's third site makes the naming problem plain. The Geisberg is registered under the Gemeinde and Gemarkung of Schoden with 13.4 hectares of vines, yet it is classified by the VDP and sold by the trade as Ockfener Geisberg. Two of Schoden's three sites therefore answer to other villages on a label, and the Herrenberg is the one that stays home.
The site's advocate is Weinhof Herrenberg, founded in 1992 by Claudia and Manfred Loch and now joined by their son Johannes. The estate runs about four hectares in total, assembled parcel by parcel with limited capital, with holdings in Ockfener Bockstein and Kanzemer Sonnenberg alongside the Herrenberg. Since 2002 the wines have been marketed as LochRiesling, a change made largely to stop the estate name being confused with the vineyard name. Their house style deliberately runs riper and rounder than the Saar's acid-driven orthodoxy, closer to the fuller wines the valley made before the 1950s, which is a defensible reading of a slope that gets its warmth late in the day.