Just after crossing the river, the road out of Saarburg passes through dense forest and emerges abruptly near the wine village of Ayl. To the left, the towering slope of the Ayler Kupp rises above the orchards in one of the most dramatic landscapes you’ll ever encounter in wine country.
The Romans planted grapes on hills like the Kupp because that was where the snow melted first in the early spring. It could, arguably, be the world’s most beautiful vineyard, lush with the deep green foliage of well-tended Riesling in July, if only the orderly patchwork of vines weren’t interrupted by black slate moonscapes and the wild brown tangle of abandoned vineyard, where the work is hard and the labor is expensive, and can’t be justified for wines that sell so cheaply.
Growers like Johann Peter Reinert, who makes wine from the Ayler Kupp, remind me of the “star thrower” in Loren Eiseley’s The Unexpected Universe, whose mission is rescuing stranded starfish one by one by throwing them out into the surf that washed them up. Reinert does the same for his vines: he carries buckets of earth back up the hill when it washes down “cheerfully” in physical conditions that would thoroughly dishearten most New (and Old) World poseurs who pass themselves off as fine wine producers.
If you haven’t tried any of these wines, and you wonder why I put so much effort into promoting them, let me just say this: German Rieslings include the most intrinsically worthwhile wines you can buy for less than twenty dollars per bottle. Period.
“the move to quality dry wine is in fact not new at all. When German wines were at the peak of their popularity, in the 19th century, they were mainly fine dry table wines. With the exception of the lovely Auslesen and rare TBAs, dry Rieslings were the norm through the first half of the 20th century.”
They are joyous wines as well as “serious” wines. They include some of the world’s noblest white wines, according to “real” authorities like Hugh Johnson and Michael Broadbent and Jancis Robinson. And before the outbreak of the First World War, they were the most expensive white wines in the world.
They’re also among the most food friendly wines in the world. As David Rosengarten of Food Network fame, and co-author of Red Wine With Fish said recently in an interview: “…the most flexible wines across the board for food are dry and almost dry Rieslings. And with the better German wines I get the additional bonus of the stuff having real character, so I can satisfy my wine brain and my food brain simultaneously.”
So let me pose an obvious question: Why do some people recoil in horror when I suggest a German wine for their dinner party? How did the image of these beautiful wines become so thoroughly debased?
It began in the aftermath of World War I, which swept away the established social order in Europe, including the aristocracy that made up most of the world’s fine wine market. The nadir came after the Second Word War, when big merchant producers in the Mosel and Rheinhessen flooded the international market with oceans of cheap sugary garbage. For the post-war generation of new wine consumers, German wine meant Liebfraumilch, Zeller Schwartze Katz, Piesporter Michelsberg, and Niersteiner Gutes Domtal products that are rarely made with Riesling.
The Wine Law of 1971, despite the best intentions of its promoters, only compounded the problem, by giving large, undistinguished wine districts equal status with the finest individual vineyard sites. No matter where it grew, any wine’s presumed quality was based on nothing more than the level of sugar in the grapes at harvest. Average yields of 20 hectoliters per hectare of Riesling (about one and a quarter tons per acre) climbed to over 100 hl/ha of Ortega and Müller-Thurgau by 1980.
“It is sad to have to say it”, laments Stuart Pigott in his forward to The Wine Atlas of Germany, “but this (law) has gradually reduced the standing of German wine in the eyes of the world … from the most prestigious of all white wines to a cut-rate commodity.”
The good news is that a wine renaissance has been underway in Germany for more than two decades, led by a new generation of small family producers, anxious to restore Germany’s reputation as a source of high-quality, estate-bottled Riesling. “We do not make wine,” one Pfalzer producer says, “we just prepare the environment in which the wine comes into existence almost by itself,” which results in many of the wines fermenting out completely, so that today more than half of the fine wine made in Germany is dry wine.
If you’re surprised to hear that, you aren’t alone. Very little dry German wine comes to the United States. When Wine Spectator trumpeted a recent “vintage of the century” in Germany, almost every wine reviewed had a notable component of sweetness, and the scores invariably rose in lock step with residual sugar levels. Nothing wrong there, except that an important expression of German Riesling is ignored if the dry wines aren’t even recognized to exist.
The problem is that the reviewers don’t really care about German wine, nor do they know the first thing about it. They don’t go to Germany. Most of their information comes from one influential American importer, who simply doesn’t like dry German Rieslings, (including most of the ones made by his own excellent German suppliers).
But according to Michael Broadbent, Wine Director at Christie’s, “the move to quality dry wine is in fact not new at all. When German wines were at the peak of their popularity, in the 19th century, they were mainly fine dry table wines. With the exception of the lovely Auslesen and rare TBAs, dry Rieslings were the norm through the first half of the 20th century.”
Seven years ago we realized that the only way we would ever represent a meaningful variety of German wine from Gutsriesling trocken through Beerenauslese would be to bypass the famous importers and go to Germany ourselves. And because we went without an axe to grind on the subject of the political correctness (or incorrectness) of any particular style, we were embraced by a group of producers that includes some of the best growers and winemakers in Europe.