Another child of Savagnin, Silvaner was born in Austria — a natural cross with the obscure Österreichisch Weiss — but found its true home to the northwest, in Franken. The founding date is unusually precise: the first documented planting was made at Castell in 1659, and the region has treated the grape as its own ever since, bottling it in the flattened bocksbeutel flask that marks a Franken wine at a glance.
Through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was Germany's most planted grape, before Riesling and Müller-Thurgau displaced it. What remains is the connoisseur's secret: where Riesling is loud, Silvaner is quiet — earthy, herbal, gently stony, a transparent carrier of the limestone soils it grows on.