German Wines

Forget the days of Liebfraumilch: German wines, both white and red, have now captured the attention of wine critics everywhere, says Adam Lechmere

If you think First Growth Bordeaux is expensive, take a look at the auction records for some of the best German wines. I had a sublime Mosel riesling the other day – Egon Müller’s 1990 Scharzhofberger Trockenbeerenauslese – which tops the scales at several thousand euros a bottle. Riesling-lovers will sell their souls for the best German examples, which are among the most delicate, long-lived wines ever made.

I mention the Egon Müller to show the heights German rieslings can reach, but you don’t need to sell your soul to discover how fi ne these wines can be. I’ve spoken before about the winemaker’s holy grail: low alcohol with power and finesse. Germany’s climate, the slate soils and sloping vineyards of its finest regions produce dry wines with abundant minerality, bracing acids, rich fruit and low alcohol. All the white wines below are less than 11 per cent – the Leitz is just nine and a half. Winemakers everywhere are desperate for the kind of alcohol/flavour balance that the Germans have been achieving for centuries.

But what about the reds? German pinot noirs routinely win the very highest honours at the Decanter World Wine Awards, lauded for their velvety fruit and seductive length. If you think you know your pinot, you’ll be amazed how Germany brings out notes of morello cherry, overripe raspberry and strawberry coulis – an entirely new range of flavours for this most expressive of grapes. A pity they’re so hard to find on the high street. Why is Germany such a hard sell? Why do supermarkets stock a handful of German rieslings, yet so many more from the New World? For a start, the names can be daunting: ‘Eden Valley riesling’ isn’t quite as diffi cult to say, or remember, as ‘Scharzhofberger Trockenbeerenauslese’. The variety of styles is bewildering too: what does Trockenbeerenauslese mean anyway? Referred to as TBA, it means ‘dry berry selection’, that is, wine made with raisined grapes with the most concentrated sugars. Then there is the problem of history: many people expect all German wines to be sweet.

As Majestic’s German wine buyer Matt Pym says, ‘Most still associate it with Liebfraumilch and Piesporter.’

But attitudes are changing. As Iris Ellmann of The Wine Barn tells me, for wine drinkers under the age of 40, ‘no prejudices prevail and people have had no run-ins with cheap German plonk’.

If you remember those ‘run-ins’, please trust me that the German dry wines are worth searching out. And if you’re still daunted by labels, there are a few rules of thumb that make buying easier. The terms Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese and Beerenauslese, like TBA, are indicators of sugar and alcohol content, determined by the level of the grapes’ ripeness. Kabinett, made from the earliest harvested grapes, has the lowest alcohol and the driest palate, TBA the sweetest. Auslese is almost always sweet. Spätlese can be dry or sweet, but the label should indicate the style: halbtrocken or trocken – off-dry or dry.

There. The code cracked, you have a whole new world of taste to explore. Welcome to the riesling-lovers’ club.