Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

How can I resist you ?

2010 Portugieser „Premium“

Weingut Wassmann

€ 8,50

There is a great demand for light red wines with character, but there are astonishingly few light reds with real character. Most lighter reds are cheap, one-dimensional and if they come from the New World then they have often been sweetened up with grape concentrate to try and hide their weaknesses. They’re the Liebfraumilch of our times! Let’s be frank, a lot of that stuff tastes gruesome to me. The problem is that red wines gain a lot of their character from the tannins extracted from the grape skins during fermentation, and once you get enough of them into the wine that it tastes interesting, then it tends towards heaviness. So making a really good light red is as difficult as climbing the North Face of the Eiger with one hand tied behind your back!

The 2010 Portugieser „Premium“ from Ralf Wassmann and Susann Hanauer’s small organic wine estate in Villány in the Far South of Hungary is a rare example of a light red with great character. First, it has the most amazing raspberry aroma. Then there’s the wonderful balance of succulent fruit, great freshness and supple tannins. In short, it does everything that Beaujolais is supposed to do, but almost never does. Just pull the cork and drink (with or without food), and if you do then I’d be very surprised if you aren’t almost shocked how quickly that bottle is empty. And it is great value for money.

By the way: Horst Hummel is no ordinary wine merchant. Please be patient with delivery. See the article „The extraordinary Herr Hummel“ about him under Berlin Wine People.

€8,50 from

Horst Hummel

Villány – Berlin

Email: hh@weingut-hummel.com

See also: www.weingut-wassmann.com

Real Pinot from J.L. Wolf in Wachenheim/Pfalz

2008 Spätburgunder (yes, 2008!)

Weingut J.L. Wolf

€ 8,50

Sometimes you get lucky and a wine which seemed unremarkable in its youth gets that extra bit of bottle age it needed to coax the best out of it and make it something special. Then you have the old fairy tale of the ugly duckling in your glass! But even when this minor miracle happens in a wine merchant’s cellar you still need to discover that wine is there! In this case it took a message from beyond the grave (thank you John Boys MW, we miss you very much!) to move me to Weinhandlung Suff in the heart of the Berlin district of Kreuzberg where I found a great Pinot Noir red for everyday drinking.

What makes this wine special is that it isn’t just fruity and soft as most Pinots at this price level are, but also has some healthy dry tannins which make it way more interesting and give it some real backbone. OK, if you drink it from a relatively small glass then the fruity aromas (red berries) will be dominant, but if you drink it from a large well-rounded wine glass, then suddenly you’ll smell autumn leaves and spicy aromas normally associated with high-end Pinots costing many times more what this regular guy does.

By the way Suff means to hit the bottle in German, and Weinhandlung Suff is everything you might imagine a cool Berlin wine merchant could be and more. There you’ll find many discoveries waiting to be made!

By the way, the story of John Boys MW will follow here at a later date.

€8,50 from

Weinhandlung Suff

Oranienstraße 200

10999 Berlin-Kreuzberg

Tel.: 030 / 6 14 21 48

Email: suff@suffberlin.de

Web: www.suffberlin.de

Red wine freshness and red wine warmth from the Portugeuse Douro Valley

2009 Excomungado

Quinta de Vale de Pios

€ 6,90

Yes, that name does mean excommunicated in Portuguese and is clear proof that not only German Jungwinzer like Christian Stahl of Winzerhof Stahl in Auernhofen/Franken who called his dry 2009 Scheurebe „[rauschgift]“ (an ugly German word for dope, literally intoxication poison), can come up with unusual and startling wines names. However, the important thing about both these wines is the combination of a seriously delicious and stylistically innovative taste with a daring name. In this case it refers to how the wine has been excommunicated from oak. I’m convinced that a majority of red wines matured in oak, regardless of country/region of origin, would taste better if they had less aroma and flavour from oak barrels. Sometimes, when I bump into one negative example after another (which happens quite often), it seems as if all reds are drastically over-oaked. This makes it wonderfully refreshing to encounter a red that deliberately sidesteps the oak mine field by relying entirely on maturation in stainless steel tanks. In my book stainless steel tanks are a great technology with an undeserved bad image due to so many thin wines being made in them, and because the current obsession with amphora and so-called vins naturels. This is a joyful wine bursting with all kinds of red berry and herbal aromas, tasting lighter, more delightful and envigorating than I imagined a red wine with 13,5% could taste. However, it is also light years removed from thin Beaujolais-Ersatz. To me it says DRINK ME!

€6,90 from

Rosário & Prange

Hermeskeiler Platz 2

50935 Köln

Tel.: 0221 / 96 43 49 88

Email: rosario-prange@web.de

Web: www.rosario-prange.de

TWO WEEKS SHOOTING THE SECOND SERIES OF WEINWUNDER DEUTSCHLAND force me to take a pause. In Mid-October Episode 5 of The [yellow tail] Saga will follow!

Bernhard Kirsten, Inge von Geldern and I during the filming for the Bavarian Television (BR) show "Weinwunder Deutschland"

2010 Riesling trocken

Weingut Kirsten

€ 8,-

Another dry Riesling as wine of the month? Am I obsessed? Yes and no. Firstly, the diversity of aroma and flavour which the Riesling grape gives is so great that although this wine is also dry with a moderate alcoholic content it tastes completely different from last month’s. That is the great thing about Riesling; a multi-faceted personality without a trace of schizophrenia. Whereas the last wine of the month was all about freshness and crispness, this time the qualities which make it stand out are the complex texture and a subtle spiciness. Bernhard Kirsten and Inge von Geldern have been working at perfecting this style of Mosel Riesling since the early 1990s and it shows. A crucial aspect of their method is simply patience in the cellar. They allowed this wine to keep slowly fermenting without any added yeast until the end of July and bottled it in early August, in contrast to many Mosel winegrowers whose basic dry 2010 Rieslings were already sold out by then. Kirsten and von Geldern expected that this would conjure from the juice of fully-ripe Riesling grapes an aromatic richness and harmony to which there is no shortcut in the cellar, and it has indeed. The result is as tantalizing as it is powerful and the often strident acidity of the vintage has been expertly tamed. This means that although it is easy to like, it has many fine nuances which only slowly reveal themselves in the glass (if you have enough patience for that). And just wait for the sensational top dry 2010 Rieslings from Weingut Kirsten which will follow later in the year.

Weingut Kirsten

Krainstraße 5

54340 Klüsserath/Mosel

Tel.: 06507 / 9 91 15

Email: mail@weingut-kirsten.de

Web: www.weingut-kirsten.de