Rather worryingly, at the generic tasting of German wines held recently in London I was introduced to someone who seemed to know everyone there, the director of the International Sugar Organization. Sugar or the cane or beet variety is no friend of German wine. All the best wines famously owe their sweetness to natural grape sugars; adding sugar to boost the alcohol level as has routinely been done in France for more than a century is frowned upon. Besides, the whole question of sweetness in German wine is a controversial one. As faithful readers will know, Germans like their wines to be as dry as possible nowadays but are still finding it difficult to convince their traditional importers in the UK and US that dry Rieslings have any merit whatsoever.
During my recent extensive tastings of German 2004s, importer David Motion of The Winery seems to have found a rich seam of dry German wine enthusiasts in London while the estimable Theo Haart of Piesport told me he was trying to convince the Germans to drink sweeter wine styles again.
The 2004 Rieslings, of all levels of sweetness, are currently being launched on the international market with huge sighs of relief on the part of their producers. “We never expected such a vintage. In the summer we had quite lousy weather”, Dr Franz Michel of Domdechant Werner’sches Weingut and once head of the German Wine Board told me. According to the Hasselbachs of Gunderloch in the Rheinhessen, who hardly managed a tan, “summer did not really earn its description”.
Budbreak and flowering had been about a week earlier than usual, but the summer of 2004’s characteristically changeable weather in Europe brought a protracted flowering process. Rain tended to fall in intermittent heavy bursts, and was lapped up by soils that had suffered so much from drought the previous, heatwave year, failing to reach very far below the surface. In the humid weather that resulted, some vineyards succumbed to the mildews to which vines are particularly prone, and even black rot, so considerable work in the vineyard was needed, just as it was in Bordeaux last summer. Many of the more conscientious growers cut off excess and imperfect fruit in early September in an effort to maximise the chances of ripening the grapes fully at all.
Even by the end of September acidity levels in Germany’s great Riesling grapes were still worryingly high. But fortunately, as so often in Germany, good weather in October finally brought ripeness so that the harvest could be carried out in reasonably fine weather from the end of October through early November, benefiting from what Werner Schönleber, one of the Nahe’s most exciting talents, called “the perfectest September and October I ever had”. This was a full four weeks in many cases after the 2003 harvest. “In 2003 we did everything we could to delay the grapes’ ripening process,” said Martin Tesch, a dry wine specialist also in the Nahe. “In 2004, it was exactly the opposite.”
In fact just about everything in 2004 was the opposite of sweltering, dry 2003 and, again just as in Bordeaux, the most common word on every wine producer’s lips about the 2004s is ‘classic’. While the distinctly non-classic red bordeaux of 2003 found enormous enthusiasm among American buyers, the American market was much less keen on the 2003 white Germans with their unusually low acidity and alcohol levels often higher than usual. (And it is no tautology nowadays to talk about white German wines when well over a third of all the wine produced in Germany today is red, and consumed mainly by the admiring Germans themselves.)
The problem in 2003 was that as acid levels plummeted, sugar levels were sky high (even if there was a shortage of flavour and extract in many cases because of the short growing season). The result was that practically every must reached at least Auslese level of ripeness. The characteristic of the 2004 Rieslings in Germany was that they were on the vine for well over the usual 100-day span after flowering and so built up lots of sharply delineated flavour, but it was a nail-biting struggle to see acidities fall to a palatable level and sugars rise sufficiently to nudge the musts into the higher Prädikat categories.
The result is a notable dearth of Beerenauslese and TBA wines at the top end of ripeness scale, and even some of the Auslesen taste rather tentative and insipid at this stage. As Gaby Dönnhoff shrugged when she saw my less than ecstatic expression on tasting their 2004 Schlossbockelheimer Felsenberg Auslese, “it’s an everyday Auslese”. The problem was that although the leaves stayed nice and green and effective for the ripening process much longer than in 2003, there was sporadic rain throughout October and November which decimated the likely quantities of grapes affected by noble rot.
Some particularly interesting Eiswein was made however, presumably helped by that long growing season. Most of it was picked on the morning of 21 dec after a severe frost took temperatures below the essential -8 deg C (so much more convenient than a few days later), some grapes having been protected by plastic sheeting from the predations of birds and rain. Erni Loosen will be able to follow the 2003 Mosel Eiswein he is adding to his mid-priced Blue Slate range with a 2004 that is likely to have much more extract and interest. I am not always the greatest Eiswein fan but I was very impressed by such 2004s as Richter’s Mülheimer Helenenkloster ** Cask 121, Schönleber’s Monzinger Halenberg and, as usual, the Dönnhoffs’ Oberhäuser Brücke.
But in general 2004 is a vintage for Kabinett and Spätlese wines, the sort I find most useful and best value. I was also unusually struck by some wines with a lower official ranking, and price, even than this. The QbA Estate Rieslings from the likes of Diel, Dönnhoff, Egon Müller, Reinhold Haart, Karthäuserhof, Sybille Kuntz, Langwerth von Simmern, Naked Grape, Willi Schaefer, St Urbans-Hof, Geheimrat J Wegeler Erben, and Christmann and GB Sauvage which are much drier than the rest, all semmed distinctly superior wines for relatively early consumption with good, crystalline flavours, from £6 a bottle.
There is no hurry to consume the best Kabinett and Spätlese Rieslings from the 2004 – these wine styles are some of the wine world’s longest-lasting – but most of them are delightfully easy to like even at this early stage. The ripeness of the acidity seems to have something to do with it, and the extract nicely counterbalances the acidity anyway. Many of the wines have marked minerality – just what we want from fine German wine. As Egon Müller observed with some relief about the 2004s, “the more we taste them, the more we like them.”
20 particularly successful producers in 2004
A Christmann, Pfalz
J J Christoffel, Mosel
Dönnhoff, Nahe
Emrich Schönleber
Reinhold Haart, Mosel
von Hövel, Saar
Karthäuserhof, Ruwer
Keller, Rheinhessen
Kruger-Rumpf, Nahe
Sybille Kuntz, Mosel
Josef Leitz, Rheingau
Schloss Lieser, Mosel
Dr Loosen, Mosel
Georg Mosbacher, Pfalz
Egon Müller, Saar
Selbach-Oster, Mosel
St Urbans-Hof, Mosel
Daniel Vollenweider, Mosel
Robert Weil, Rheingau
Zilliken, Mosel
For hundreds of tasting notes on 250 individual wines, see tasting notes on purple pages.