|
Germany
History
In the cellars of the town hall of Bremen--for centuries a center of the German wine trade in the north--repose some large old casks. Nothing remarkable in that, except that the casks contain wine dating back to the seventeenth century. The oldest, which a select few are allowed to taste on occasion, contains a wine made when Oliver Cromwell was still ruling England. When the guardians of this historic cellar feel it is time to refresh the evaporating wine with something younger, they top up with wine taken from casks of eighteenth-century wine that rest nearby.
These ancient wines, now as dry and pungent as a venerable madeira, are testimony to the long history of German wine production. In the Mosel there is archaeological evidence from Roman times. In Brauneberg and Piesporter are vestiges of Roman wineries and other artifacts, and in other parts of Germany there is archaeological confirmation that vineyards have been present for 2,000 years or more. It seems likely that the styles of wine varied considerably, from very dry to unctuously sweet. The Germans date the 'invention' of late-harvested sweet wines from 1775, when the messenger bringing authorization to begin the harvest to the Schloss Johannisberg estate in the Rheingau was delayed. The grapes had began to raisin on the vine, but when they were eventually picked, they made astonishingly delicious sweet wine, despite their unwholesome appearance.
It's just a legend, as there is documentary evidence of late-harvested wines throughout Europe since the seventeenth century. But it's the great sweet-wine vintages that mark the progress of German wine through the past two centuries: 1893 and 1921 were both outstanding years, and bottles of beerenauslese or trockenbeerenauslese from these vintages still surface from time to time, or are sold at auction for astronomical sums.
German wine was always expensive, though, and demand for it during periods of pre-1914 prosperity kept prices buoyant. It also encouraged counterfeiters, just as in France, where the amount of Chateauneuf-du-Pape available before strict regulations were introduced always exceeded the quantity of wine the region could conceivably have produced. Wine laws were introduced in 1901 to combat fraud. During the same period, the wines of the Mosel began to challenge the supremacy of the wines from the Rheingau and Pfalz, which, with their large estates, many in aristocratic hands, had long dominated the market for premium German wine. Many Mosel estates had once been owned by the Church--a history still reflected in the names of estates and vineyards--but have been under secular ownership, for the most part, since the early nineteenth century.
The two world wars and the dire economic and social troubles of the intervening years inevitably had an adverse effect on German wine, although Prohibition in the United States had little impact, as comparatively little wine was exported. The domestic wine trade was, however, dealt a very specific blow as a consequence of anti-semitism. Many leading and well-respected figures in the trade were Jewish and, after their imprisonment, expulsion or murder, their acumen was sorely missed. Despite the collapse of the international wine trade and the lack of men to work the vines and harvest the grapes, 1945, surprisingly, turned out to be an exceptional vintage, as also was 1949.
The postwar years saw a revival of the German wine industry and the introduction of practices that may have seemed sensible at the time but have had unsatisfactory long-term consequences. Vineyard reorganization imposed German logic on a fairly chaotic system, but the primary goal was not so much to improve the quality of viticulture as to lessen the costly dependence on manual labor. Previously, vineyards had been planted where nothing else would grow, on steep, often stony slopes that were hard to cultivate but yielded grapes of tremendous intensity and quality. New vineyards were planted on flatter land, where the more fertile soils often yielded four times more grapes than hillside sites--good news for growers, bad news for quality-conscious consumers.
New grape varieties--generated by crossing existing varieties--were part of the same movement. Postwar Europe was thirsty for sweet wines, for nutritional as well as gustatory reasons, but good sweet wines, made from late-harvested riesling on good sites, were costly to make. The new crossings, however, ripened early and were genetically selected to produce high sugar levels. It was a grape-grower's dream: large, very large crops of very sweet wines. Unfortunately, most of them were heavy and sickly and the proliferation of wines from these new varieties--such as ortega, optima, bacchus and siegerrebe--did nothing for the reputation of German sweet wine. Of the new varieties kerner could produce decent dry or off-dry wine, and rieslaner could, and still does, produce sweet wine with a bracing balancing acidity. Scheurebe, too, can be excellent.
Together with advances in viticulture, there were innovations in winery equipment. The traditional large oak casks found in every German cellar--beautiful to look at but expensive and time-consuming to maintain in sound condition--were often replaced, especially at the larger estates, by stainless-steel tanks. This caused no problems in itself, but along with the tanks came batteries of filters and centrifuges, which, if coarsely handled, could strip the wines of their individuality. Sterile filtration encouraged the production of suessreserve, stable grape must that could be used to sweeten wines without the risk of further fermentation. Whereas sweet wine in German had traditionally been the consequence of incomplete fermentations that left residual sugar in the wine, now the taste could be replicated by technology. The worst of the innovations, however, has proved to be the German wine law of 1971, well-intentioned, but disastrous in the long term. It has defined the commercial history of German wine ever since and is dealt with later.
In the 1980s and 1990s there has been a trend toward greater diversity in the wines of Germany. Dry white wines, even from regions better suited to off-dry or sweet wines, became extremely fashionable, as growers sought to meet the demands of wine writers for a native equivalent to, say, chablis. Although warm regions such as the Pfalz proved well-suited to the production of dry rieslings, more northerly regions such as the Mosel were more likely to produce tart green wines that gave pleasure, it seemed, only to German gastronomes. Export markets, unused to the flavor of unripe grapes, could not abide them. The vogue for such wines has diminished, although they remain a feature of domestic wine production.
Much German red wine, even the highly praised spaetburgunders from the Rheingau and Ahr, strikes outsiders as thin and weedy, although there were exceptions in ripe vintages. But the Germans have always lamented the seeming inability of their climate to yield stylish fruity red wines and set about finding ways to correct this. From the 1980s some good, if rarely world-class, red wines, usually from spaetburgunder but also from new varieties such as the juicy dornfelder, began to be produced in warmer regions such as the southern Pfalz, Wuerttemberg and Baden.
At the same time the worldwide fashion for barrique-aged wines hit Germany, with some disastrous consequences--barrique-fermented rieslings. Fortunately, the trend was short-lived. Today there are some very good barrique-aged wines, especially from southern Germany, notably from the pinot family of grapes and chardonnay.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century the best wines of Germany are surely as good as they have ever been. Estates such as Breuer, Robert Weil, Mueller-Catoir, von Buhl, J. J. Pruem and Dr Loosen--and perhaps two dozen more--release wines of stunning quality in a wide range of styles. The choice of styles today is greater than it would have been a century ago and the experimentation of the 1980s has settled down to a steady exploitation of appropriate grapes in appropriate sites. Overall, yields remain far too high and the crisis for the German wine industry continues, but at the top end, German wine is of brilliant quality.
From "Encyclopedia of Wine"
©Global Book Publishing Pty Limited 2000
|
