Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

„Yes, but that doesn’t stop people buying them. That’s another of the things about the wine world which is completely illogical, but doesn’t change for that reason!” said Reinhard Löwenstein of Weingut Heymann-Löwenstein in Winningen/Terrassenmosel (pictured above in his new cellar extension). I’d just told him how again and again during the last couple of years I’ve been terribly disappointed by red and dry white wines from Burgundy/France in the three figure Dollar/Pound/Euro per bottle price league with the magic words “Grand Cru” on the label. That’s the highest legal designation for burgundian wines; the Holy Wines of Burgundy! For me a poor quality wine is a bad thing at any price, regardless of where it came from, the grape variety or who made it, but with a three figure price tag I’d say it qualifies as a Liquid Disaster Area in a Bottle. But, as Löwenstein observed, illogically, even that doesn’t seem to prevent those wines from selling, which shows that factors other than the taste often pay a significant role.

I didn’t bother to rattle off a list of the names of the producers who disappointed me to him, but here are the most important names on my roll call of shame: Domaine Armand Rousseau in Gevrey-Chambertin, Domaine Perrot-Minot in Morey-St.-Denis, Domaine de la Romanée Conti in Vosne-Romanée and Domaine Bonneau du Martray in Aloxe-Corton. On the plus side I’ve tasted some wonderful red and dry white wines from Burgundy for much more modest prices, most notably from Domaine Charles Audoin in Marsannay and Chateau de Fuissé in Pouilly-Fuissé. If they dominated the picture I’d certainly feel much more positively about Burgundy.

“OK, those poor but expensive burgundy wines still sell,” I answered, “but that doesn’t mean they fail to disappoint many of the consumers who encounter them. It just means there are always enough new consumers with enough money to pay the prices and who believe in the hype. Wines in this price league are often consumed for status reasons. Nouveau riche always liked to flaunt their wealth and there’s more of them in today’s world than a generation ago.” Löwenstein admitted this was the case , but still seemed reluctant to criticize any of the winegrowers of Burgundy for their pricing policy. I think I can understand why.

Seen from the point of view of a leading German producer of Riesling wines with what the French call “terroir” character (the taste of the place, of the vineyard) like Löwenstein Burgundy is the place to look up to. With their “terroir” wines, or more accurately with the help of their best wines, the “terroir” story about them and a lot of networking, the leading winegrowers of Burgundy have steadily cranked the prices for their “Premier Cru” (the second highest designation for wines from ther region) and “Grand Cru” wines higher and higher. Four figures seem to be the new goal for some of them! Production costs certainly did not rise as fast as wine prices, so (if you do the simple math) profit margins became larger and larger. Compared to burgundian wines of similar quality with a similar individuality of character the dry Heymann-Löwenstein Rieslings taste like great value for money. No wonder Löwenstein, along with many of his colleagues in Germany and beyond, would like to make something closer to the kind of profits leading burgundian winegrowers make, instead of the much smaller kind leading Riesling producers currently do!

However, his argument about the remarkable imperviousness of the global wine market to the reality in the glass also explains why he will almost certainly never make burgundian-style profits. The global wine market generally remains set on the path it’s already on, because most consumers think about wine in hierarchies of perceived value which are intimately linked to the hierarchy of wine prices. (In contrast, there’s no relationship between the hierarchy of production costs and wine prices, since the former are almost completely invisible to consumers). Even the cleverest and most dedicated wine producer can usually only influence the global perceived value of his wine to a small degree, and that requires a long period of time. Regardless of grape variety or home region his or her best chance is in markets where a large number of consumers trust their own taste and risk making their own quality judgments. For example, Piemont/Italy wouldn’t be where it is today if producers like Angelo Gaja or Elio Altare hadn’t dramatically improved the quality of their wines, and enough consumers in markets like America and Germany had acknowledged that by paying higher prices. This was a rare case of rapid change in the wine market, though it still took several decades.

During the same period Riesling, particularly dry style Riesling, often seemed stuck in the Bargain Basement of Planet Wine; a fact that used to deeply frustrate me. In some markets with a high proportion of self-confident consumers (I think particularly of Scandinavia,  Australasia and the German speaking countries) this has changed markedly, but globally the change has thus far been fairly modest. This, and the sheer number of dynamic new and young Riesling producers in Germany and around the world who cannot (yet) charge high prices, means that most Riesling wines remain modest in price and great bargains can still be found. That strikes me as something good. Riesling is, and will long remain, a democratic wine rather than a status product for the 1% of wine drinkers. And I have to say, that I feel at home amongst the 99% of wine drinkers!

Nonetheless Löwenstein has a good reason to yearn for higher profits on the psychological level. High prices give wine producers not only healthier bank balances (and much larger tax bills!), but also more self-confidence. On my recent trip to Alsace/France Jean Michel Deiss of Domaine Marcel Deiss in Bergheim said something to me about his region, which could be extended to all the others where high quality Riesling is grown,  “the winegrowers in Burgundy have too much self-confidence, and we have far too little.” I can’t explain how this functions, but I’m sure that a winegrower’s self-confidence or lack of it rubs off on her/his wines. A significant injection of self-confidence do for the producers of Riesling would surely lead to another jump in wine quality, and if that came without a major hike in prices that would be nearly perfect. In the interests of Riesling drinkers everywhere on Planet Wine I’ve also made this part of my job here. The reality in the wine glass makes my task so much easier!

I feared that the thoughts I posted after discovering that I’d been made a finalist for Best Single Subject Blog at the Wine Blog Awards might strike many readers as self-indulgent and incoherent ramblings, but the responses have all been interesting and suggest that I said something worth saying. I also worried that these thoughts could seem arrogant, since I played down the importance of any and all such prizes, and insisted that the prize I might win was inappropriate. However, I just got a comment from Sean O’Keefe of Chateau Grand Traverse in North Michigan, one of the leading new generation of Riesling winemakers in America, which makes clear that some people immediately got what I wrote yesterday about this not being a Single Subject Blog. As he wrote, “Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t only a sports writer.”  So I decided to risk accusations of even greater arrogance by posting the above photograph of myself (thank you again Bettina Keller in Berlin!) which to my mind makes it crystal clear that I am not only the Riesling Guy.

The red coat I’m wearing in the photograph was recently made for me by Neodandi of Seattle (soon in New York) about whom I will be writing and posting something during the coming week. The look on my face has a lot to do with the fact that as a teenager I wanted to train as an actor, a profession which I finally drifted into in 2010 when filming of my German-language TV-series, ‘Weinwunder Deutschland’, wine wonder Germany, began. Screening of the third season of which will begin on BR3 (click the above tab for a German-langauge text about the new series) on BR3 in Bavaria on Saturday, June 8th. During the three years of shooting a learnt a great deal about movie-making and this encouraged me to start work on shooting my own feature-length film. This is an expensive and time-consuming business and because it’s all my own time and money work will extend into next year, with the first screenings set for September 2014.

Another important comment was a question about the final line of my last posting. Someone asked whether I meant to write, “the truth will win out,” or what I actually wrote, “the truth will out.” In fact, this time the world champion in typos (myself – who else could it be?) typed what he intended to. The question, which came from an American, is important for the truth will out is an old English expression, which means that the truth will always push to the surface on its own, though its own inherent force. Of course, that could be taken as meaning that people like myself who work with truth are unnecessary and irrelevant. However, I certainly don’t see it that way, for ignored and surprised truths need champions to aid and quicken this process. The crust of lies which covers so many truths is continually forming, spreading and thickening if nothing is done to disrupt its accretion. Better still to rip it open so the truth can rapidly and decisively come into the daylight, even if this is a painful process.

The 20th century history of my own nation, Great Britain, as it continues to be told in schools, newspapers, popular magazines, books and the electronic media is a horrendous example of  how a crust of lies can long obscure important truths. The apparent, but disingenuous, commitment of my nation’s establishment to the ideals of humanity, honesty and fairness only make a series of policies which at the least verged in a genocidal direction worse. Compared to that situation – for example, the British colonial regime in Kenya during the 1950s will soon be judged to have committed war crimes which were denied by successive governments for more than half a century –  the illusions which I regularly try to debunk here are small and unimportant. However, there’s no difference in kind when it comes to truth and lies. Either you’re in favor of the former or you’re in the service of the latter. The worst situation is to be a servant of lies, but unaware of your position, and sadly that’s not a rare situation for people to be in our world. In fact I’d say that to some degree we’re all suffering from illusions, all in need of help in breaking their pernicious influence. That’s my goal.

PS May 26th is my 53rd birthday, so please excuse my absence.

Sorry, but this is not a Single Subject Blog, even if it has been listed as a finalist in that category of this year’s Wine Blog Awards. The whole point of STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL is using Riesling as as key to unlock many doors leading in all kinds of directions. That is particularly easy here in New York Wine City (NYWC), where everything is crashing into everything else, and as a result it’s hard to keep things of any kind separate from things of any other kind. That’s why I chose this great photo of NYWC by Birgitta Böckeler who I used to share the Hotel of Hope – the place I’m currently staying in Manhattan’s East Village – with.

Let me give one simple example of the interconnectedness which is so vital to this Blog’s functioning. Because he was one of the great Riesling experts during the period 1935 – 75, and wrote some books which document this period of Riesling History brilliantly I got interested in the American wine author, importer and consultant Frank Schoonmaker. In his ‘Wine Encyclopedia’ of 1964 I discovered a table listing the vineyard areas for each of the major grape varieties in California half a century ago. Comparing those statistics with the current ones showed that grape varieties which are now of such major importance that they’re taken for granted, like Chardonnay and  Merlot, were virtually unknown back then. Back then there was more Riesling planted than those two fashion-grapes put together! This proved how California’s wine industry was every bit as dynamic as its IT industry during the same period, even if that was (until a recent turnaround) to Riesling’s detriment. It’s an observation I’ve not found in any other wine publication, although it is vital to understanding what makes California radically different to a European winegrowing nation like France. Again and again wine journalists and authors compare France and California in a thoughtlessly simplistic manner as if climatic and other conditions (compare the latitudes!) were directly comparable and their wine industries functioned in the same way (compare the cultural differences!) Usually these comparisons are made in order to find one wanting, so that the other can be glorified.

As much as I love Riesling that’s not my goal. If Riesling is a wonderful thing, then all I need to do is find and present the wines and connected facts for that to become obvious (it is already apparent to many people). And if you decide that there’s no glory in Riesling, then so be it. As we say in England where I come from, the truth will out!

I’ve just been nominated for a blogging award – more details of that below – which has made me to do some serious thinking about what I’m up to here at STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL. First of all, right from the beginning I’ve been well aware that this is what the world calls a blog, but I always saw myself as a journalist, and this as another (special, as much because editor-less and very rapid as because electronic) medium for publishing my work. Regardless of the medium, journalism is a two stage process, the first part of which is research like the tasting of Finger Lakes Rieslings at the Hotel of Hope in New York Wine City’s (NYWC) East Village earlier this year pictured above. However, as regular readers are well aware, much of my research is conducted on the road with winegrowers in their home regions, some of which I feel familiar with, while others are completely new to me.

Even when it all seems familiar to me, for example when I visited the Dönnhoff estate in Oberhausen/Nahe about a year ago (see the photo below), there are always surprises for which I must try to be open. In this case it was the first vintage of dry Riesling from the Höllenpfad vineyard site of Roxheim, a wine which tasted very different from anything else I’d ever tasted there since my first visit back in May 1986. Back then Helmut Dönnhoff was a virtually unknown, but obviously talented and (quietly) ambitious winemaker. He was what Germans now call a Jungwinzer, or a talented young winegrower. Whether the winegrowers and wines I encounter are famous or completely unknown is part of their identity, but that doesn’t alter the fundamental challenge of telling their story at all.

This side of my work is all about selecting and arranging the impressions I gathered and the ideas which I (and others) had about them in a form and sequence which enables them to function as well as possible in the particular medium. This is what most people consider “creative” work, but I’m guessing that my last sentence strikes many of you as making that process sound banal and very “uncreative”. However, I promise you that, as New York-based novelist Tom Wolfe said in a bunch of recent interviews, writing is mostly hard work and the pleasure is nearly all in completing a story that seems to work well. By “work well” I mean a text which strikes me as conveying my impressions and ideas in a way that’s comprehensible and compelling for readers unfamiliar with the particular material. Of course, it always takes some time for me to find out if my gut feeling was right and it’s actually comprehensible and/or compelling. If it’s not and my gut feeling was wrong, then I have to do some rethinking before the next try.

And that brings me to the most important thing I’ve got to say today, which is that writing this stuff is not about winning a prize like the Wine Blog Award for the Best Single Subject Blog, for which I am a finalist this year. Of course, it would be flattering to win this award and it might also be very good publicity for STUART PIGOTT RIESLING GLOBAL, however, the whole point of my work is communicating something of the exciting winegrowers and wines to readers, that is connecting with them. The sole measure of my success is your interest and excitement. So if I win this prize I’ll continue, listening to and read your comments as avidly as I do now. Let’s be frank, I don’t want or need a medal, a prize or even a Wine Blog Award!

Experience has taught me is that it’s strong and surprising things which touch you most. Often it’s funny things which get the best response, but only if they also have something important to say. You, the readers, certainly want to be entertained, but you want to discover stuff (and I’m talking that old-fashioned thing called truth) you can’t get elsewhere and that’s exactly what I’m trying to give you. Thank you for your interest and for your excitement!

Yesterday evening I returned to my Room with a View at the Hotel of Hope in the East 7th Street of New York Wine City’s (NYWC) East Village and immediately hit the Riesling trail. By a minor miracle I walked into Pearl & Ash  at 220 Bowery and got a seat straight away, in spite of that rave review in the New York Times just a couple of weeks ago. (See www.pearlandash.com) I tried a bunch of sensationally flavorful and subtle dishes from creamy chicken butter with toast to wonderfully fresh marinated salmon, and from squid pan-roasted with seaweed to well-done and melt skirt steak in a richly savory sauce. Every one would have been flattered by one or other of the slew of Rieslings on the list that ranged from sweet Spätlese from Zilliken’s Rausch vineyard on the Saar to the Leitz of the Rheingau’s dry wines from the top sites of the Rüdesheimer Berg. However, even if you ignore those Rieslings which are just perfect given the current sub-tropical weather it’s a great wine list that’s neither trying  to show off how clever the sommelier, nor to pander to the popular thirst for well established names. It was a great start to my long visit to the US during which I will be based here in NYWC, but seeing a large chunk of this mind-boggling country. I will, of course, be regularly reporting from the Riesling Trail here. WATCH THIS SPACE!

When I arrived at the two parcels of vines which my team and I planted at Weingut Klosterhof Töplitz in Töplitz/Brandenburg yesterday this is what I found. Just 16 days after planting almost 100% of the nearly 1,000 Pinotin vines we planted were already growing, some of them as vigorously as the vine pictured above. For almost 52° 30′ North that’s really not a bad result! This was due not only to the team’s dedicated work, but also to a near ideal weather pattern with alternating rainy and sunny days, no cold, but no extreme heat either.  The large lakes on three sides of the “Island” of Töplitz certainly played a role in moderating temperatures and helping the vines get a really good start. More evidence that this 2.6 hectare / 6.5 acre south-facing slope is a “Grand Cru” site in the reemerging wine growing region of Brandenburg. Reemerging? Yes, the earliest record of wine growing here was in 1360 and it was Cistercian monks who were responsible. During the Middle Ages they also played an important role in establishing winegrowing regions as diverse as Burgundy and the Rheingau.

Tomorrow I leave for New York Wine CIty (NYWC) and my New York Riesling Diary will resume. It’s exactly two months since I left and I’ll no doubt find NYWC in a very different mood to when I left. This time I will be in the USA for almost three months and will do a lot of traveling, including the Riesling Road Trip organized by the German Wine Insitute which during the second half of June will take me by the land route from LA to NYWC via a southerly route through Las Vegas, Texas, New Orleans, Alabama and the Carolinas. These are all places which are new to me. In early July I’ll be in Vancouver/British Columia, then nearby Okanagan Valley, the most northerly wine growing region on the American continent, which will be exciting because this is serious Riesling territory that’s unfamiliar to me. However, even there wine growing doesn’t extend to 52° 30′ North!

I’m just a humble citizen of Planet Wine and a Riesling Fellow Traveler who’s repeatedly damned to adopt the mantle of a prophet. OK, in this case that’s like me complaining that the forest is burning down after having been caught playing around with matches. It was I who picked that shawl out of the cloakroom at Heymann-Löwenstein in Winningen/ Terrassenmosel myself when Reinhard Löwenstein said that it was time to taste the young 2012s down in the cellar. Then of my own free will I answered Cornelia Heymann’s question as to whether she could use my camera in the affirmative and bingo I’m a Riesling Prophet again! And what does this Riesling Prophet have to say for himself? At first sight it looks like some kind of odd Germanic riddle.

Pictured above is a complete section of the half-finished facade of the new cellar extension at Heymann-Löwenstein. The „background“ is a layer of charred wood, on which the German translation of the ‘Ode to Wine’ by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973) is written in stainless steel letters. For Reinhard Löwenstein the combination of these archaic and modern materials is as important as the optical effect. However, if you don’t know Neruda’s ‘Ode to Wine’, then I strongly recommend one of the most amazing poem about wine ever written. Here’s a good English translation:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ode-to-wine/

If you open the doors of perception, then you can find all the images and ideas of Neruda’s poem in the Heymann-Löwenstein wines, so this is not as crazy a piece of wine architecture as it might seem at first glance. Chance brought me to the estate at exactly the right moment to taste the young 2012 wines, because the last of them had finished fermenting and been racked (separated from the heaviest lees, or dead yeast) ten days before I arrived, so they were in a really good state to gain a first impression.

They strike me as being the perfect realization of everything Cornelia Heymann and Reinhard Löwenstein (pictured below) have been doing since they founded what seemed like a very alternative winery back in 1980. It’s hard to believe now, but back then founding alternative wineries was really the last thing that was considered possible. They were really exploring the Outer Limits of the Previous Wine Epoch, as I call the period before daring and creativity became desirable in the world of wine and the possibilities seemed carved in stone by (a French wine) God. And of course, as has been repeatedly proven right around Planet Wine, that  was complete bullshit!

The first Heymann-Löwenstein wines I encountered were the 1987 dry Rieslings, which was the vintage with which they switched to labeling the wines with the vineyard name printed most prominently and everything else small. That also seemed seriously revolutionary at the time. It was also a bitch of a vintage for dry wines, being on the thin and the sour sides, but the 1987 Heymann-Löweinstein wines were a revelation; harmonious and full of character. 2012 is an extremely good vintage, (in the hands of a good winegrower) at once ripe and intense, yet charming. The 2012s at Heymann-Löwenstein have all the spicy complexity of previous vintages married to a stunning brilliance. To drink them you’ll have to wait until at least September though.

Yesterday evening was the big party for the opening of the new cellar extension at the much more famous Weingut Robert Weil in Kiedrich/Rheingau. I decided not to photograph them due to the crowds, and because the estate’s website has much better photos than I could ever have done. To catch them go to:

http://www.weingut-robert-weil.com/index.php?id=142&L=2

The party was great fun, except for the fact that the “special” winetasting for journalists that (very long) lunchtime had half-rubbed me out. Why is it that at important events like this, it is always felt that without a bunch of Big Reds (in this case 15 of them) something vital is missing? I think the answer lies largely in the twin prejudices that those wines are the Right Stuff to drink with red meat (which isn’t necessarily the case, as can easily be showen) and that red meat is the Right Stuff for the “main” course. It often strikes me that this also has a macho element, as if the color of the red wine in a grey-haired man’s wine glass somehow emphasizes or even enhances his virility. And if that nonsense isn’t hanging in the air, then the well-known high prices certain Big Reds command are felt to enhance the sense of self-importance of the (generally male) drinker, even to give him a halo of sophistication through mere association. To my mind that’s just so much junk left over from the previous Wine Epoch, and actively detracts from wines like the rich, yet refined 2005 ‘Opus One’ in Napa Valley/California or the vibrantly youthful and seriously concentrated 2010 ‘Saffredi’ from La Pupille in the Marema/Tuscany.

Riesling was allowed a ghetto in the form of the first flight in the tasting, which many older wine professionals consider no more than a warming up lap of the track before the serious business of those Big Reds. That was a bit sad, because Wilhelm Weil and his team produce 100% Riesling including top wines in the dry style (his 2004 Gräfenberg Riesling Erstes Gewächs was included in the tasting) and sweet style (conspicuous by their total absence). Was it really more important to live up to the outdated expectations of the older wine professionals at the table, than to show that for which the Robert Weil estate has been famous for for more than a century? I can’t make any sense of that.

At the party, which like the tasting for the journalists was perfectly organized, a slew of excellent wines from members of the VDP association of top German producers were poured. None stood out more for me than that which this picture shows someone photographing, the dry 2012 Riesling ‘Mineral’ from Emrich-Schönleber of Monzingen/Nahe. It had everything including the refreshing quality of all lighter Rieslings. In spite of his critical and popular success Frank Schönleber is one of the most underrated young winemakers in Germany. He’s been making the wines at this estate since 2006 and has built upon the achievements of his father Werner in a remarkable way. ‘Mineral’ is one of his creations, and as the name says it really is an intensely mineral wine,  in 2012 with every bit as much charm as depth. At once it was refreshing and the full fathom five of Riesling!

I found this funny sign – I’m in complete agreement with it, of course! – in the tasting room at Maison Trimbach in Ribeauville/Alsace where I had an amazing vertical tasting of Clos Ste. Hune and Cuvée Frédérik Emile dry Rieslings with Pierre Trimbach going back to the 2005 vintage, which I then extended to 2001 at the dinner table that night. The first vintage of Clos Ste. Hune was the 1919 and the effective first vintage of Cuvée Frédérik Emile was 1964, dates which seem to emphasis Alsace the continuity of dry Riesling production in the region.

Since I returned from Alsace the story of this complex region has been going through my mind and I’ve been delving into the stats to see what they have to tell. The only major changes I expected to find was the virtual replacement of Sylvaner by Pinot Blanc & Auxerrois (usually bottled as a cuvée and marketed under the Pinot Blanc name) as the grape supplying the basic dry wine of the region, which the stats fully confirm. In 2009 Sylvaner accounted for just 3,573 acres / 1,446 hectares compared with 8,231 acres / 3,331 hectares for Pinot Blanc & Auxerrois. More surprising was the growth of Pinot Gris, partly due to fashion, but also as a result of the new clones (which crop more generously and reliably than the old ones) which began to be planted in the 1980s. And indeed that is the case. In 1982 there was just 1,360 acres / 550 hectares of Pinot Gris in Alsace, a figure which had hardly changed during the previous twenty years, but by 2009 this had risen to 5,822 acres / 2,356 hectares a leap from just under 5% of the entire vineyard area to around 15%. That says to me that the global Pinot Grigio (Italian name for this grape) phenomenon has also extended to Alsace.

This set me thinking about time frames, which are of vital importance in analyzing any statistics and have a relationship to them somewhat analogous to that for the context to the facts. For example, the fact that a particular stock has risen sharply today on Wall Street may be highly significant if it is part of a trend extending over many months, or virtually insignificant if during the same period that stock has been yo-yoing up and down by similar amounts. So I decided to look back much further than the stats from the 1982, the year of my first brief visit to the region. Then there were 5,560 acres / 2,250 hectares of Riesling planted in Alsace compared with 8,357 acres / 3,382 hectares today. That’s 50% growth, but over a period of 27 years or less than 2% per year, which is rather unspectacular. However, change the time frame and look back to 1958 and the radical nature of the change becomes apparent. Then there were just 1,945 acres / 787 hectares of Riesling in Alsace, which means that between 1958 and 1982 there was 185% growth, which is an average of 7.7% growth per year for 24 years; very serious growth. I would say that represents the change from Riesling being a notable speciality in the region to being a major grape variety (1958-1982), to then overtaking Gewürztraminer to become the clear number one grape variety in the region (1982-2009).

So the international success of Trimbach’s Clos Ste. Hune and Cuvée Frédérik Emile really did inspire the winegrowers of Alsace and as each wave of producers developed Riesling ambitions, so the stylistic diversity of Alsace Riesling expanded and expanded until it reached its current delightful and sometimes confusing complexity.

Thanks to the élan and professionalism of my team the planting of my two parcels with just short of 1,000 Pinotin vines in the historic vineyard of Töplitz/Brandenburg went like a dream. Instead of needing two days, they raced through the task in a single day. The photo above shows my hoe and I at the end of the afternoon after we all returned to the estate building after finishing work. It was only this morning when I woke up that I realized just how hard I’d thrown myself into this work. As well as wielding my hoe to the clear the ground for the planting of the vines, I also two TV teams (local station RBB and the national ZDF) to look after, plus a handful of newspaper journalists throwing a stream of questions at me. However, it was worth going through all that in order to communicate the fact that climate change really has changed the entire ball game of wine growing at latitudes like this – 52° 26′ 23″ – far north of the long supposed limit of viticulture in the Northern Hemisphere at 50° N.

This is nothing entirely new though, for during the Middle Ages when the climate was even warmer than now there already was wine growing this far North. It was Cistercian monks from the Abbey of Lehnin who first planted the vineyard of Töplitz/Brandenburg back in 1360 and it was only in the Mid-19th century that the combination of bad frosts and cheaper wines imported from further south by railway killed off winegrowing in this part of Germany. From 2007 Klaus Wolenski replanted the vineyard and since the 2012 vintage a team lead by Ludolf Artymowytsch has continued to cultivate Weingut Klosterhof Töplitz organically. Their 2012 “Cuvée Blanc” and Grauburgunder (Pinot Gris) prove what’s possible here. Although 2012 wasn’t a specially good growing season the Grauburgunder was picked in early October at a ripeness of 94° Oechsle, which translates into 12.5% natural alcohol. Better still it tastes at once ripe – an aroma of ripe melon – and fresh, without any hint of green or sharpness from too much acidity.

I chose the red Pinotin because it too will reach full ripeness in early October in an average year or late September in warmer than average year, is very resistant to mildew (Oidium) and noble rot (Botrytis is only negative for red wines), has good resistance to downy mildew (Peronospera) and will had less trouble with drought stress than white varieties would. To enhance this I chose the Paulsen 1103 rootstock which is very drought resistant. It was the very sandy soil – the south-facing hill is basically a huge sand dune – which made me think about the potential drought problems in years with summers like those of 2003 and 2006. They would be the only years warm enough to ripen Riesling grapes properly, but the drought stress would then almost certainly lead to wines with untypical premature aging (technical term UTA) and/or intense petrol aromas (technical name TDN). It didn’t take me long to figure out that this was sadly a rather unsuitable place for my favorite grape variety.

The sandy soil and the gentle 8% slope made it really rather easy for us to plant those thousand or so Pinotin vines. The picture left shows one of the young vines going into the ground. Those feet belong to Horst Hummel (left) of the Hummel estate in Villány/Hungary, who is also a lawyer in Berlin, and Helmut Reh (right) a physiotherapist from Regensburg/Bavaria, who I met when I was a guest student at the famous wine school in Geisenheim/Rheingau back in 2008/9. A sizable group of my former fellow students came to help me, notably Nico Espenschied of Weingut Espenhof in Flonheim-Uffhofen/Rheinhessen, Fabian Mengel of Weingut Zimmer Mengel in Engelstadt/Rheinhessen, Johannes Sinß of Weingut Sinß in Windesheim/Nahe, Christian & Johannes Spiess of Weingut Spiess in Bechtheim/Rheinhessen and Gerrit Walter of Weingut Walter in Briedel/Mosel. To my surprise they were joined by several somewhat older colleagues, namely Erik Riffel of Weingut Riffel in Bingen-Büdesheim/Rheinhessen and Christine Bernhard and Bernd Pfluger of Weingut Janson Bernhard in Harxheim-Zellertal/Pfalz. So, in spite of the fact that it was the first time I’d planted a vineyard there was no shortage of experience!

And, of course, after we were finished the wines needed to be watered both in the physical sense (essential work undertaken by Ludolf Artymowytsch), but also in the metaphysical one. A slew of good and great wines flowed before and during dinner, and I almost lost complete track of time, just catching the last connection back to Wine Metropole Berlin and a very different world to that inhabited by the cows, sheep, deer, geese, hawks and vines of Töplitz. THANK YOU EVERYONE!

Yes, today is the day! Today is the day that I plant “my” vineyard in Töplitz just outside Berlin on the southwestern side in the state of Brandenburg. Sadly, even with the assistance of global warming Riesling won’t ripen there except in the warmest years. The combination of low rainfall and a sandy soil (typical of Brandenburg) also means that drought stress for the vines is almost inevitable. This is another good reason to think twice about the grape variety. That’s why I decided to go for a new red grape variety (pictured above) called Pinotin. It was developed by the Swiss vine breeder Valentin Blattner in the Pfalz region of Germany with the Freytag vine nursery of Neustadt. It has a bunch of additional advantages including excellent resistance against mildew (Oidium) and noble rot (Botrytis), plus good resistance against downy mildew (Peronospera). I followed Pinotin in an experimental vineyard in Werder/Brandenburg for two years to see how it actually did under our weather conditions and was very impressed; it outperformed a range of grape varieties from Pinot Noir to Tempranillo (both not so bad for Brdenburg)! I also tasted the Pinotin wines from the Rummel estate in Landau/Pfalz, who proved that Pinotin has a fine cherry aroma and interesting dry tannins. I thank them for the photograph above. Today a crazy group of friends, some from my days as a guest student at Geisenheim, others from Berlin, are gathering to help me plant 1,000 Pinotin vines on the south-facing slope which belongs to Weingut Klosterhof Töplitz. Wish us luck!

I will, of course, report in full on how it went. Please be patient.