Wine 201: Germany

Maybe more like 301. I tried to simplify—dive a lil deeper into history with me.

There’s a lot to understand and just straight up memorize when it comes to German wines, especially because there are a lot at play. There’s the government wine law, then private organization rules, and then, there are also recent changes that have been made, all of which we have to know and commit to memory in order to make those informed decisions and selections for our next bottle of wine we’re in the mood for.

And just like everything else, history is key to understanding the wine laws as they are today.

1945. Post-war times were obviously devastating all around the world; for Germany, international boycotts were happening, the economy and infrastructure were destroyed, and the country had been divided. Naturally, not great times for anyone or — for the purpose of this post— for wines either. Vineyard areas had been bombed and its workers were dead, and the majority of the quality wine merchants were Jewish, and well… we all know the crushing tragedy surrounding that part of history.

The war did bring on some technological advances as we know, and this applies to the wine scene as well: electricity and other developments in the cellars. But ironically, this did not mean better wine and in fact, it was quite the opposite. In desperation, technology meant opportunities for increases in production, and this included flattening out precious terraces on steep sites to use machinery.

We talked about how important steep hills are for ripening grapes in colder regions of the world and for better grapes in the Sun post and the Hills & Mountains one, so in retrospect, it’s a big blow to treasured vineyards that could have otherwise made fantastic wines. Moreover, there were close to no regulations, and there was a huge surge of pretty much hodgepodge terms for styles, villages, and vineyards on the labels of even random wines, which created massive confusion and diluted the whole point of having certain terms reserved for only the best sites and certain winemaking styles.

So how could quality, and clarity on guarantee of those be restored? Some lawmakers had an idea.

The German Law of 1971

More like “The German list of many laws of 1971.” There are many, many rules written in this thing. But let me attempt to highlight what I think are the most pertinent ones.

The intentions were good. It meant to clean up and simplify terms, while prohibiting the use of unauthorized terms. It also meant to apply new standards for wines.

It demarcated 11 wine growing regions or anbaugebiete (yes, there are 13 today—2 were added later on when the country reunified).

The law also set up classifications for wines into tiers, into Deutscher Wein, Landwein, Qualitätswein, and Prädikatswein, in order of least to greatest quality levels.

Qualitätswein, or “quality wines,” and Prädikatswein are at the top of the quality levels, with the latter broken into selective criteria in ascending grape ripeness levels, measured by the Oechsle levels from the grape must to water density. So as you go up the Prädikat, you can expect the wines to be sweeter, as more sugar equals more potential of sweetness. The order goes as follows:

• Kabinett: "reserve” wines, picked at usual harvest times

• Spätlese: “late harvest,” picked at later harvest times, from even riper grapes

• Auslese: “select harvest,” very ripe grapes picked selectively

• Beerenauslese: “berry select harvest,” literally hand picked berry by berry, often affected by botrytis.

• Trockenbeerenauslese (aka TBA): “dry berry select harvest,” hand picked berry by berry, but mostly those that are pretty much raisinated from botrytis.

• Eiswein: ice wine, made from grapes minimum BA quality, but frozen from low temperatures.

But also notice how it’s potential of sweetness based on the sugars present in the grapes pre-fermentation for the Prädikat levels. Many times producers choose to ferment the wine dry, aka let the yeast eat up all the sugars present in the grape juice, and this is often indicated with the word “trocken.”

Oh how neat, everything is tidy and makes sense, and easy to classify!

Or is it?

There were grave downsides to this newly placed law.