You can’t visit the wine regions of Germany (as I did in September) without feeling the depth of their history and its influence on their wines.
In the Mosel, buildings hundreds of years old are made of the same solid gray slate as the challenging soil that is barely penetrable by the roots of vines, which cling to precipitous slopes. If you stand next to a slate wall in the September sun, you’ll feel the same heat, absorbed and retained, that enables those vines to go on ripening even as the sun wanes after autumn’s solstice. In the perfectly south-facing “sundial” vineyard of Schloss Leiser, the winemaker Thomas Haag’s father, Fritz, tested the heat here by cooking an egg on the slate soil. It took 22 minutes.
Schloss Lieser’s wines, all riesling, show both a filigreed lightness and a surprising substance thanks to the winemaker’s success at balancing ripe fruit flavors with assertive acidity. In a renaissance of respect for their own winemaking traditions, many German winemakers like Mr. Haag are returning to old methods of farming with lower yields, more hand labor, fewer chemical interventions, and indigenous yeast for fermentation. The stainless steel tanks introduced in the 1980s to “modernize” winemaking are being augmented by old 1,000-liter barrels to achieve more complex wines.
Visiting Reinhold Haart in Piesport, I stood at the same place where, in 370 A.D., Ausonius (from Bordeaux, tutor to the Roman emperor) wrote his poem “Mosella” in tribute to the Mosel river that flows there: “O river with Bacchus’s fragrant grape planted on your vineyard-filled ridges …”
A few yards away stand the excavated ruins of an ancient Roman winery, large enough to handle 150 acres’ worth of grapes. Their reconstructed presses can be used today, but their wines were very different, seasoned with pitch and spices brought from the far reaches of the Empire. They hadn’t discovered riesling, which is spicy enough on its own.
Staying in a restored medieval castle in the Rheingau, I awoke to see what the first Christian emperor, Charlemagne (742-814 CE), saw there: that the best vineyards can be identified by weather patterns on the slopes. He planted vines where the snow first melted on the quartzite slopes of Johannisberg (latitude 50 degrees north; New York is at 44 degrees north). I saw that the fog covering adjacent hills did not touch Schloss Johannisberg, a monastery where, in 1775, the first “Spatlese” wines were made from fruit affected by noble rot, after a courier sent to the bishop for permission to start harvest came back late. A statue of the tardy courier in the Schloss’s courtyard reminded me of Paul Revere, who made his (much faster) ride to Lexington in the same year.
Much as I enjoyed the sweet late harvest wines I tasted in Germany, my favorite wines were dry rieslings. At Schloss Johannisberg, I was smitten by a 2009 riesling dry “Rotlack Kabinett” trocken, a focused, expressive wine with a high tone of pure minerality.
At other German wineries, I found similarly exciting dry rieslings. Robert Weil’s 2009 “Diedrich Grafenberg” is spectacularly aromatic, while another favorite, the Müller-Catoir “Breumel in den Mauern,” showed the same minimalist elegance I saw in the wine property’s post-Napoleonic Biedermeier furnishings. More history!
Tasting Dr. Burklin-Wolf’s “Wachenheimer Rechbachel,” I agreed with their rep: “Dry riesling is intellectual sauvignon blanc.”
I was surprised to learn that more than 80 percent of the wine consumed in Germany is dry. They export 80 to 90 percent of their sweet wine. Truly dry (“trocken”) German wine has been exported to the United States only in the last five years, and, even so, most of the 22 producers I met on my tour said their U.S. importers want only sweet wine.
Although the United States has replaced the United Kingdom as the biggest importer of German riesling (tripling in the last five years), many of the “dry” rieslings sent here are actually what in Germany is called “feinherb,” a new term that many producers use to replace “halbtrocken,” or “half-dry.” Halbtrocken is legally defined, restricting producers to 18 grams of sugar per liter, while feinherb is not defined at all.
Much of the perception of sweetness depends on the balance of sugar and acidity, so it’s not a simple formula. To help consumers, the International Riesling Foundation (drinkriesling.com) offers a Riesling Tasting Profile to help consumers anticipate the relative sweetness of riesling wines.
Several Long Island producers, including Paumanok Vineyards, Wölffer Estate and Peconic Bay Vineyards, also make dry rieslings that are also worth seeking out.
For more on my trip to Germany, check out my blog, VinGlorious, at louisahargrave.com.
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