Why German Red Wines Used to Suck (and No Longer Do) The Coming New German Pinot Noir Revolution

Anyone who has been to a German winery to taste will tell you about the dreaded moment that

lingers over the tasting.  It’s when they bring out the red wines.  You sit down, you have pleasant conversation, 15 delicious, well made white wines in increasing order of sweetness.  And finally, they ask you if you want to try the reds.  Your stomach grumbles in fearful anticipation, you wince, try not to show your fear and say “yes, I’d love to.”

Now if you are really unlucky, they bring out the Dornfelder.  Dornfelder is this incredibly high yield grape (with clusters twice the size of a cow’s udder) used to make reliably cheap and horrid red wines for “local consumption.”  Local consumption means that no one who has access to wine that is grown more than 5 miles from the winery would ever buy them.  They are basically German Thunderbird.

If you are slightly less unlucky, they bring out the pinot noir.  The nose is what I like to call “Spatburgundery.”  A sort of nasty combination of green peppers and gasoline.  The wines typically tasted of new oak and lacked much fruit.  Overall, a ghastly experience.

(I must say that a few producers always made good or great red wine - I include Sebastien Furst, Rebholz and Huber as examples).

The Germans are among the most efficient people on earth.   I’ve known them to serve soft boiled eggs with a timer so that they are eaten after the exactly proper number of seconds of post-cooking rest.  They make some of the best engineered cars in the world.  Cameras.  Industrial equipment, you name it.  You can get through a German airport in about 5 minutes.  And, of course, they are famous for riesling.  Like them or not, both sweet and now dry rieslings are very well made and consistent.  And Geisenheim (their most famous wine school) is reliably churning out new, talented winemakers like a factory.

So why did the red wines suck so badly for so long?  And why are they finally getting better?

Clueless About Wood

German Riesling is generally fermented in steel and/or large wooden barrels that do not add much wood flavor.  The Germans, as a result, do not have much experience with the effects of wood on wine (good and bad).  This extends to their professors at Geisenheim (according to a young German winemaker who is a recent graduate).  As such, they had no idea how to age their wines in wood so as to provide structure and certain flavors but not take over and dominate the wines.

Climate

While there are many microclimates in Germany and the South is, obviously, hotter, the German climate is relatively cool.  40 years ago, they had difficulty getting grapes to be ripe with developed flavors.

Technique

There are many lesser well known techniques that allow winemakers to tweak the flavor of their wines.  I’m not talking about the mad science of recent years (like reverse osmosis) but relatively simple things like adding stems or controlling temperature during fermentation.  I was with a very famous, well regarded German maker of red wine who said that this vintage was the first year that he had added stems to his wine.  The point is that because there so few winemakers making quality red wine, there was no community to experiment with and share these techniques.  Winemakers frequently meet and taste each other’s wines share ideas and see how they work.  This didn’t really happen with fine red wine as few people were making it.

The Reduction in Suck and the Path to Greatness

A few years ago, I started to notice that the general suckiness of German reds was starting to decrease.  Now I am seeing a trend of German red wines actually starting to be great.

First, the climate is generally hotter and more German winemakers are trying to make red wine.

Second, many young Germans are apprenticing at well regarded makers of red wine (in Germany and Burgundy).

Third, Germans are learning how to make red wine in their climate.  They are learning how to use wood.  And this knowledge is spreading.

I am not arguing that the German red wine industry is ready to take on Burgundy’s best.  There are some producers making excellent red wine to rival some very good producers in France.  And why not?  Political boundaries are the work of man, not nature or God.  Geologic formations and soil types know nothing of politics and Germany is a giant country with many microclimates.  Some regions are generally well situated for pinot noir and others have microclimates that can allow for the making of great pinot noir.

Germany is already the third largest maker of pinot noir in the world.  They are on their way to being a large producer of quality pinot noir.

And red wine experts are starting to notice.  Tim Adkin conducted a famous blind tasting of 400 German Pinot Noirs in 2011 and selected 20 as the representatives of Germany for an international testing (judges included Jancis Robinson and Stephan Reinhardt).
http://www.timatkin.com/articles?250  The Germans reds were 7 of the top 13 scorers and 2 of the top 3 scorers (they were over-represented) but outperformed several top tier Burgundies (including Dujac’s 2007 MSD).

Some of the new German Pinot Noir is more traditionally Burgundian.  When aged, it is richer and tastes of sweet wood.  But some is sort of like the dry Riesling version of Pinot.  Heavily mineralic and just exquisitely refined and balanced.  The fruit is there but the wine is not about the fruit.  It’s about the aromatics and mineral/fruit/acid balance.  These are early days as the number of very good and great producers still count in the low dozens.  But a New German pinot noir style is in the making in front of our eyes.  It is almost at critical mass.

These wines are still very, very inexpensive compared to their pinot counterparts in Germany and the US.  That is changing as the Germans learn about these wines and bid up their prices.  But make no mistake, the German Pinot Noir revolution is underway.