A Pinot by Any Other Name

There’s far more to Germany than Riesling, you know. Richard Woodard gets to grips with the Burgunder trio of Grau, Weiss and Spät, and wonders whether the locals might have got the emphasis slightly wrong…

In the past, putting together the German section of a wine list has not necessarily been an over-complicated business, a question above all of plundering the country’s Riesling riches to discover the best of these quintessentially food-friendly wines. Sure, you might add the odd Sylvaner or Scheurebe (and indeed the latter did particularly well in last year’s Sommelier Wine Awards) for something a little bit quirky, but in restaurant terms, the country has long remained pretty much a one-trick pony.

But now producers are increasingly trying to overturn this monovarietal reputation, trumpeting the potential and food-friendly properties of a succession of other grapes – most prominently, the Pinot trio of Spätburgunder, Weissburgunder and Grauburgunder.

Lost in Translation
There’s an odd dislocation here in the terminology used. Most premium producers are intent on using the German names, eschewing easy-to-understand Pinot Noir for the unpronounceable mouthful of Spätburgunder, and only using the grape’s international name for their ‘accessible’, lower-priced wines.

The argument is that using local names draws attention to the distinctive properties of Späts from Baden, the Pfalz and the Ahr. But in conversation, winemakers constantly talk about Pinot this and Pinot that, never using the grape’s local moniker. And surely that’s significant – German red wine is enough of a hand-sell for sommeliers in the first place, without having to explain that the obscure, over-long word with the umlaut on the label is the same grape as that found on the Côte d’Or.

Semantics aside, German Pinot Noir (let’s call it that to save ink) ticks quite a few of the ‘hidden gem’ boxes. Take Malterdingen in the Baden region, for instance. According to Weingut Huber’s Bernhard Huber, monks first identified the vineyards as bearing uncanny similarities to Burgundy as long ago as 1285.

‘We have nearly the same soil in the vineyards and we have the same vinification, so we have some structure like Burgundy,’ Huber says, before adding that he doesn’t necessarily subject himself to trying to ape Burgundy in every way. ‘I love 1990s Dujac and 100% whole bunch. For us, that’s interesting, but it’s not the optimum. From year to year and quality to quality, we have between 20% and 80% whole clusters in the wines. We have a style in the region, and it’s not the same as Burgundy, or the same as the Ahr, which has nice fruit but is missing our texture.’

Most premium producers are intent

on using the German names, only using the grape’s

international name for their lower-priced wines

Those big claims are backed up in the best wines, such as Huber’s Malterdinger Bienenberg 2007, whose smoky, earthy fruit comes from vineyards planted in the mid-1950s. But pricing – locally these top wines are typically north of €40 a bottle – pits them against some pretty good kit from Burgundy. Even if you accept that the quality is there, how much can UK restaurants sell at that kind of price?
The problem is that production is limited and the local market is a strong one. It’s a bit like the historic issues with some California producers: why, if you can sell your wine for fifty bucks in the local market, would you go to all the trouble of exporting it and taking a price cut in the process? It’s something that Hamish Anderson looked at in his column in the last issue of Imbibe.

Local Demand
This is evident, too, in the volcanic soil Baden hotspot of the Kaiserstuhl. Weingut Freiherr von Gleichenstein’s 2009 Weissburgunder Spätlese from the Eichberg vineyard is a relative steal at €15 – but he sells it in four months and exports precisely nothing. Ask Johannes von Gleichenstein if he’d like to enter the UK market and he shrugs – he just doesn’t need to.

Move north into the Pfalz and it’s a broadly similar story. Here the Burgundy comparisons are closest in terms of the sheer diversity of the region and its soils. Hansjörg Rebholz of Weingut Rebholz in Siebeldingen produces good Pinots from soils that he too likens to Burgundy, but adds a note of caution. ‘We deliberately look for chalky vineyards and I think that helps us to have more complex wines,’ he says. ‘I look for Pinot Noir with elegance, with minerals. For me, it’s similar to Riesling. There are very different soils in the Pfalz and huge geological variation.’

That’s hardly surprising in a region that, even in a hail-decimated year like 2010, churns out 1.65m hectolitres of wine. But demand for the strongest Pinot Noirs, like Rebholz’s 2004 Im Sonnenschein Grosse Gewächs, is so strong that he can comfortably charge €40 a bottle.

Banking on Red
Move up one more rung on the quality ladder to a producer like Friedrich Becker and top-notch wines like his Sankt Paul and Kammerberg Pinots touch almost €50 – nice work if you can get it, but of limited interest to buyers in the UK.

The decent wines of August Ziegler in the Pfalz are more realistically priced than most, but the company’s entry-level Pinot Noir, locally priced at around €8, translates into US$20 by the time it lands in the US. Move up to the Barricot Select line and the price triples – a problem acknowledged by Harald Ziegler. ‘Some German consumers will pay this, but when you export it, and with the margins of the retailers and importers, you can’t sell it,’ he says.

It’s hard to see Germany’s ‘Pinot trio’ of grapes

ever playing anything other than a minor supporting

role to the country’s reigning monarch, Riesling

But value is still there if you look hard. An up-and-coming name such as Weingut Neiss, which only started exporting a few years ago, has kept pricing realistic as the company slowly builds its reputation.

Axel Neiss has sought fruit from limestone-rich, higher-altitude vineyards in the extreme north of the Pfalz, yielding wines with welcome acidity and a distinctively mineral character – sometimes absent in Pfalz wines from sunnier climes. His top Pinot Noirs tip the scales at about €20 – still not an easy sell by the time it hits the UK, but better than most. The only snag? Despite being keen to, he doesn’t export to the UK – or at least, not yet.

Arguably Neiss’s most impressive wines – an entry-level and an old vine Weissburgunder priced at about €7 and €10 respectively – exhibit beautiful fruit and texture, plus that chalky character that exudes freshness and food-friendliness.

Pinot Noir is so fashionable right now, particularly in the US, that it’s no surprise these wineries are most anxious to talk about their red wines. The danger is that they overlook the sometimes even greater quality – and certainly more attractive value – of their Grauburgunders and Weissburgunders.

Riesling Rules
Back to Ziegler. Having acknowledged the challenges of exporting €25 Pinot Noir, it seems remarkable that the same producer’s fruit-forward, fresh-edged Grauburgunder Kabinett Trocken 2009 dips below €7. ‘We use a slow maceration and it’s also a question of how you crush the grapes,’ says winemaker Uwe Ziegler. ‘When you use a picking machine, the grapes are already partly crushed. So we pick by hand and handle the grapes carefully – we don’t crush them before pressing.’

Look back to the other top producers mentioned here and you’ll see a similar trend. Becker’s Pinot Noirs are among the very best in the whole country, but they shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow superbly structured, beautifully textured whites like his Weissburgunder Kalkgestein 2009 or Grauburgunder Kalkmergel 2009 – the latter hugely aromatic and seasoned with white pepper. The price for these? €15 and €14 respectively.

It’s difficult to imagine Germany’s ‘Pinot trio’ of grapes ever playing anything other than a minor supporting role to the country’s reigning monarch, Riesling. The quality is not yet anything like as consistent, for one thing, and market conditions make prices challenging and availability difficult.
But the country also risks placing too much emphasis on the pre-eminence of Pinot Noir, both in its home market and in key export destinations like the US. In doing so, it may well be missing a trick and ignoring the substantial merits of Weissburgunder and Grauburgunder, the rather unfairly less-heralded members of this Pinot threesome.

Editorial feature from Imbibe Magazine – January/February 2011

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