Good German Pinots: oxymoron or reality?

Wines & Vines,  March, 2004  by Rudi Graeter

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Wurttemberg, with its capital Stuttgart, a wine town in its own right, is one of Germany's lesser known wine regions, In fact, Wurttembergers love their wines so much that most of it is consumed at home.

I grew up in this wine country, where men would spend evenings in the pub, sipping two or three viertele (quarter liters) of the local reds with names like Spatburgunder (Pinot noir), Dornfelder and Lemberger. These wines were light and fruity, with just a touch of residual sugar. Burgundies or Bordeaux, the role models for so many New World winemakers, were not on the radar.

Years later, after having had the good fortune of tasting red Burgundies and California Pinots, the reds back home tasted shallow and insipid. My first encounter with "serious" German red wines was in Baden, across the Rhine from Alsace, during a visit in 2002. I wasn't exactly bowled over. However, most of these Pinots had come from the difficult 2000 vintage.

Back in California, I found an intriguing '99 Spatburgunder at DeeVine Wines in San Francisco, made by Hans-Jakob Kuhn of Rheingau Riesling renown. Then, in November 2002, Newsweek published a gushing article about German Pinots. Was there a paradigm shift in the making? Not according to Robert Parker, who writes in his most recent Wine Buyer's Guide, "... the German Pinot noir (is) a grotesque and ghastly wine that tastes akin to a defective, sweet, faded, diluted red Burgundy from an incompetent producer. Need I say more?"

But wait. Suddenly I am noticing German Pinots on the wine lists of such an outstanding San Francisco restaurant as Slanted Door, and at the new Valhalla in Sausalito. Could it be possible to produce Pinot noir and other reds of substance and breed in some of Europe's most northerly vineyards with their precarious weather? Might it be feasible to compensate for the shortcomings of the climate by planting vines on extremely steep hillsides in narrow valleys that trap the heat?

In the spring of 2003, I made arrangements to visit some of the best-known red wine producers of Germany the following summer. Ted, a fellow Californian and Pinot aficionado, made one his derisive comments about Spatburgunder when I told him about my plans. However, he liked the idea of traveling through the wine country and joined me.

Germany's wine regions along the Rhine and its tributaries have a red wine tradition reaching back to the 13th century, when Burgundian monks founded monasteries there. This ancient tradition was disrupted with the French conquest of the Rhineland under Louis XIV in the late 1600s, which brought with it massive imports of French red wines. Most German growers could not compete, and switched to whites.

Reds lingered on in a few pockets. Their declining quality relegated them to the status of local curiosities. This began to change when winemakers who had worked in France and in New World wineries came on the scene in the early 1980s. They realized that they had the ingredients to make better reds, despite the vagaries of the northern climate.

Now came a period of furious experimentation. It started in Wurttemberg, the one region with an unbroken red wine tradition, where growers use a number of red varieties besides Pinot noir. Winemakers there were the first to experiment with barrique aging.

Sigfried Roll, cellarmaster of the princely estate of Furst zu Hohenlohe-Oehringen, was one of the pioneers who aged his Lembergers in barriques. A barrel tasting there showed that they have an uncanny resemblance to good Bordeaux.

"When we wanted to experiment with actual Bordeaux varieties," Roll said, "we knew the wine bureaucrats would rip out the vines, so we planted them hidden behind our local varieties."

The authorities eventually relented, and these experiments continue. A barrel tasting of the 2002 Bordeaux varietals was tantalizing.

Other producers near Stuttgart, like the estates of Werner Kuhnle, Karl Haidle, or Peter Wohrwag, produce excellent reds, sometimes blends of the delicate Pinot noir and more robust varieties like Lemberger or Dornfelder.

In the Rheingau of Riesling fame, reds are a rarity, except in the village of Assmannshausen, home of Walter Schug, one of California's Pinot pioneers. Until the recent "red revolution" in Germany, most Pinots tended to resemble the image that Robert Parker conveys.

But change is in the air. The charge is led by August Kesseler, whose polished Pinots from his best vineyards belong to the top category of German reds. When we got to the estate, a distraught Kesseler excused himself. "I've got to drive up to the vineyard to check on my vines. Did you see the hail storm that just hit the village?" The heat wave in Europe had almost made us forget what vintners are up against in such northerly climes.

Our next destination was the Ahr, a small tributary of the Rhine. Most reds there are still insipid and guzzled by daytrippers from Bonn and Cologne. However, the world's most northerly Pinot noir outpost, with its shockingly steep vineyards, is home to a handful of vintners who produce some of Germany's best Pinots. The pioneer is Werner Nakel, a former teacher.