The Hook in the River

Winninger Hamm

German vineyard names are possessive: Winninger means "of Winningen," the village the site belongs to. Winningen sits on the left bank of the lower Mosel about five kilometres upstream of Koblenz, at the far northern end of the region, in the stretch known as the Terrassenmosel. Here the valley narrows and the slopes are too sheer for row planting, so the vines stand on hand-built dry-stone terraces. Winningen's terraces run toward Weißenberg at Kobern in what the village calls Germany's largest contiguous terraced landscape.

Winningen has five Einzellagen: Uhlen, Röttgen, Domgarten, Brückstück and Hamm. Uhlen and Röttgen carry the reputation. The Hamm is the one worth knowing anyway.

Position

The name comes from the Latin hamus, a hook, for the sharp bend the Mosel makes at Winningen. That derivation is the village's own. The Hamm covers roughly 13 hectares on the slope above the bend. Where it ends, the Uhlen begins: the two share a boundary at the Winningen end of the larger site, with no gap between them. From there the Uhlen carries on upriver, crossing out of Winningen's land into the Gemarkung of Kobern. Exposition is south to southwest.

The gradient is the point. Terraces here are cut into slopes that in places exceed 100 percent, which is steeper than 45 degrees. Winningen describes the Hamm as similarly steep to the Uhlen, where as many as 29 terraces stack one above the other.

Geology

The Terrassenmosel is not a single rock. That is what separates it from the Mittelmosel, where blue Devonian slate runs for kilometres with only shifts in weathering to distinguish one site from the next. Within the Uhlen alone, the Laubach beds carry a high proportion of lime and are shot through with fossils; the Roth Lay is extremely hard rock whose slate turns from grey to various shades of red; the Blaufüsser Lay works the other way, a blue-grey rock whose clay fraction leaves it the least resistant of the three. One classified hillside, three named parcels, three different rocks.

The Hamm sits on the clay slate and blue slate of the Singhofen beds, a Lower Devonian unit. No calcareous band of the kind that runs through Laubach is recorded here, and that absence is the useful contrast between the two sites.

The soil is skeletal to the point of being mostly stone. The clay slate breaks into thin chips, so the ground stays open and light. Roots take the vertical route, working down into fissured rock for their nutrition instead of fanning out sideways. The result is a vine drawing from a large volume of stone and very little soil.

The Wine

Riesling, essentially without exception. The standing local description of Hamm Riesling is spritzig und rassig, crisp and racy. Growers on the site describe the aromatics as yellow-fruited and flowering, and they place the wine's character in the slim, mineral half of the spectrum rather than the broad one.

Producers and Classification

The Hamm is not a VDP Grosse Lage. Knebel, Winningen's most closely watched estate at seven to eight hectares and essentially all Riesling, joined the VDP in 2017; its Grosse Lagen are the Uhlen and the Röttgen. The Hamm is not among them.

It matters less than the paperwork suggests. Knebel has bottled a Winninger Hamm Riesling under the site name, and Hamm fruit also feeds the estate's Von den Terrassen, blended there with parcels from Uhlen, Röttgen, Brückstück and Domgarten.

Rüdiger Kröber, one of the 44 growers working Winningen's 89 hectares, farms the Hamm and bottles it under the site name. That is the Hamm's standing in the village: an unclassified terrace lying hard against a Grosse Lage, as steep and as hand-worked, and still sold as something less.

This comprehensive guide is part of the WineSaint Wine Region Guide collection. Last updated: August 2026.