Wine Counterculture Is Alive and Well in Franken
Perhaps Martin Hirsch’s decision to construct a portable composting toilet in his vineyard can be chalked up to some kind of frustration therapy. His vines are in a frost-induced state of shock and he suddenly has more time on his hands than he’d anticipated. So, early hour be damned, there’s welding and hammering going on at the Römergarten in Kitzingen, all to a soundtrack of Depeche Mode pouring from a loudspeaker.
One by one, the five winegrowers, colorful tattoos adorning their muscular bodies, who call themselves “New Kitz” come together. Michael Völker arrives in overalls and a straw hat. Thomas Patek comes directly from his vineyard. They are joined by Lukas Herrmann and Simon Haag, who work together at Gut Wilhelmsberg, an ambitious project in what was formerly Weingut Wilh. Meuschel jr.
There are high-fives and hugs, and each of the New Kitz — which sounds like “new kids” when pronounced with a German accent — offers a clever, quippy greeting. They are an unceremonious bunch, these protagonists of the new vintner generation in Franken, quick-witted and confident and ready to turn local winegrowing on its head. Although there are limits: After all, nature doesn’t play favorites.
Martin Hirsch
Martin Hirsch is a relative newcomer, but he’s already had a crash course in the risks of winegrowing. In 2023, it took just a few minutes of hail to trash his vineyard, Eherieder Berg. “When you’ve hugged every vine in the vineyard seven times over the course of a spring, it leaves you sad. I was bitterly disappointed with Mother Nature,” Hirsch says.
He is a self-taught winemaker, having worked in Frankfurt as a digital media designer and in the restaurant industry before taking over his parent’s farm. Those few minutes were enough to teach Hirsch that nature gives plenty, but also sometimes takes mercilessly as well. This spring saw many estates in Franken once again lose the majority of their expected crop — the New Kitz included.
The winegrower group gathered officially for the first time on May 1, 2023, united by the belief that the vintners could achieve more by working together. Each of the five had already established himself in another field before coming to wine. Völker, for example, grew up at his parents’ winery in Kitzingen before leaving to earn a master’s degree in philosophy and work in London for several years. Haag made his money in Hamburg with wind turbines.
“Kitzingen was hibernating,” Haag says. “Franken had a lively wine scene that was doing lots of cool things. But almost nobody knew about it.” Now, Kitzingen is a center of renewal.
But the region’s musty image lingers: In many minds, it is still viewed as a cauldron of local folklore, dedication to local specialties such as Schäufele (pork scapula) or Blaue Zipfel (sausage ends) and dotted with crown glass windows in warped half-timbered houses, inhabited by a humble generation of winegrowers more comfortable stifling their voice and staying inconspicuous than anything else.
Gut Wilhelmsberg
Even if the region has long since shifted into something else entirely, “Franken remains for many no more than the old Bocksbeutel in the dustiest corner of the shelf,” Lukas Herrmann bemoans. “But there are also a lot of new things growing out of that rubble right now.” It’s the winegrowers themselves who are pushing back against the status quo — some radically, some more gently, others through a prism of natural wine that might horrify the upright citizenry. All are linked by the desire for change.
Herrmann is working out his own vision of “maximum classic” at Gut Wilhelmsberg. This leads to Rieslings and Silvaner that shine the spotlight clearly on the minerality of the fossil limestone soils. His specialty is sparkling wines, such as a Silvaner sekt brut nature from 2019, with plenty of grip and momentum. Little surprise, given that he apprenticed in Rheinhessen under sparkling wine guru Volker Raumland.
Even in the past, some Franken wines were better than their reputation, but the bottles were often slow sellers because they didn’t have the clever marketing of some other wine regions. “The previous generation was too humble to blow their own horns,” Simon Haag recounts. “But that just doesn’t work anymore.”
Colorful and diverse as life now is here, wine culture has devolved starkly towards its extremes. At local events and festivals, it’s not uncommon to see wine mixed with isotonic drinks into a Schorle unworthy of the name — an absolute nadir in Franconian civilization.
Thomas Patek
“We might as well just pack things up if that’s what our future looks like,” Thomas Patek says of the threatening apocalypse. The New Kitz winegrowers understand their work as a form of resistance that might just be able to slow down the cultural hollowing: for example, through pop-up wine bars intended to draw a young clientele to more interesting wine types, the kind served up in Martin Hirsch’s leafy Römergarten. For Kitzingen, it’s a new dimension in wine culture.
One of those is an unconventional red wine from an oft-besmirched grape variety called Domina, a wine that Thomas Patek conveys with the charm of a vin de soif. It offers plenty of vibrance, grippy tannins, juiciness, drinking momentum, berry-esque spice, and a relaxed nature. The vintner works at 2Naturkinder, the estate owned by Michael Völker and his wife Melanie Drese, two founders of today’s natural wine movement in Franken.
Given his deep experience, Völker is a trusted adviser for the other New Kitz. Patek tends to a half-hectare (and growing) of his own vines, vinifying the wines at 2Naturkinder. He likes to experiment with extended maceration and raises some of his wines in amphora, working with little or no added sulfur. Before entering into winemaking, he worked as an industrial engineer, until a period of depression forced him to shift gears sharply: “I had to change everything to rekindle my passion for life.”
That passion is now in plentiful supply, for wine. Patek’s ability to speak so openly about depression is another sign of change in Franken: The previous generation would have bit a lip until it bled before talking about such a deeply personal matter.
Beyond Kitz: Peter Leipold
Just a few kilometers from Kitzingen, in the town of Obervolkach, Peter Leipold is making his own somewhat unusual contribution to the new Franken wine. He spent four-and-a-half years working for Klaus Peter Keller in Rheinhessen. Since 2018, Leipold has cultivated seven hectares, 40 percent of it planted to Silvaner, primarily on keuper soils but also some fossil limestone. Among his rarities is a Silvaner grown on reed sandstone, suspected to be “the only pure Silvaner from that soil.”
Leipold has developed a soft spot for Riesling, a less common choice in Franken. He admits, “after being with KP Keller I just can’t go without Riesling.” Spätburgunder is also important to him, having been “infected” by Sebastian Fürst in Bürgstadt and Comte Liger-Belair in Burgundy. Leipold’s ideals are lean, taut wines with none of the classic Franken baroque or the somewhat unwieldy, sweet stylistics of the previous generation — but also removed from avant-garde natural wines.
His wines are a masterclass in how to spite climate change: the Escherndorfer Lump vineyard is not just warm, but scorching in high summer; from it he makes a Riesling with laser-precise acidity, harvested on September 19, 2023 and raised in a used barrel from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.
Nico Olinger
Nico Olinger in Iphofen is also a member of the dedicated keuper faction. Geological identification and association are not something you can choose in Franken; you have to be born into them. Olinger is quite satisfied with his 17 hectares of vines, cultivated organically. Silvaner is his lead variety. The Iphöfer Kalb is his favorite site, with vines up to 50 years of age: The wines grown here on gypsum keuper perpetually stand out for their spicy, elegant aromas and complexity built from minerality.
Within just a few years, Olinger has moved his parents’ estate forward from the liter bottles of his father’s time and especially from the resignation that marked the last generation before the shift to the modern wine world. For a time, Franken appeared to be fully decoupled from the other wine regions, which seemed better able to adjust to rapidly shifting trends and marketing strategies.
The ambitious winegrower is open and open-minded, but is also aware of his limits and strengths. In the cellar he focuses on “relaxed vinification” with native yeast fermentations and long lees contact. His Silvaner has an unusual breadth, depth, and calm, borne by keuper minerality. It is vital to him that the charms of Silvaner, to his mind “the best variety in the world,” get a chance to unfold.
It annoys him to no end when day trippers come to his rustic tasting room and ask for Sauerbier. “And you can bet that at the end they’ll then demand rosé to boot,” he says with a touch of sarcasm. But Silvaner in Bocksbeutel is, in his view, at a disadvantage “because of old prejudices.” “What else do I have to do to convince people about Silvaner finally?” he asks, with more than a bit of fight.
Christian Ottenbreit
Christian Ottenbreit lives in Obernbreit, near a former brick factory. The estate was long a classic Franconian mixed farm; Ottenbreit’s father sold grapes to the local cooperative. The wiry young Christian Ottenbreit is wearing shorts and a thick, flashy silver chain. They look good on him, fitting his style as a go-getter who was somewhat surprised by the success of his wine, but who has grown used to daily life full of contradictions and stimuli: Today here in the provinces, tomorrow in the rough-and-rowdy St. Pauli district of Hamburg.
Learning to navigate between vastly different environments like that has been good for him. In 2018 he launched his start-up estate with just a half-hectare of vines, although he now cultivates eight hectares. His first vintage, he says in retrospect, was “fairly broad, too much shaped by the maturation in wood and the alcohol, so two years ago I made a cut.”
The hallmark of his striking wine style is a nuanced barrel influence, with all but the simpler estate-level wines seeing wood. When Ottenbreit stands in his Obernbreit Kanzler vineyard, he points over to the nearby Sulzfeld, where estates like Zehnthof Luckert have made big waves. And why, the vintner with the opulent silver chain asks, can’t Obernbreit soon achieve that same acclaim?
Franziska Schömig
Rimpar, north of Würzburg, is not an idyllic wine town whose beauty inspires poetry. But Franziska Schömig is working to put it on the wine aficionado map nevertheless. Schömig works half days as a teacher, a conscious decision that helps her stay steady through the cyclical ups-and-downs of the wine business. Viticulture is perpetually beset by problems, from climate change to the rising fight over water use. “I need a little distance from the industry,” the vintner says. She cultivates three hectares of vineyards and doesn’t want to grow. “I want to have a life outside wine as well.”
Not relying completely on viticulture is the freedom that allows her to be bold. She took over her father’s vineyards, tended organically even in his time, which she says guarantees “that there’s as little to do in the cellar as possible.” As a winegrower, she finds Silvaner “to be a glorious variety capable of doing so much, even if people still think of it just as a companion to white asparagus.” She also flies the flag for Domina and Portugieser. “I like those underdog varieties,” she says. Her wines have a different air to them, with crisp fruit, tension, and momentum.
Florian Reus
The unprepossessing facade of a row house in Randersacker might seem an unlikely location for a talented, if unheralded, Franconian to make astounding wines. Yet Florian Reus seems destined to become big news, even if right now he’s treated as an insider’s secret even among winegrowers. Reus does nothing in half measures; he is ambitious beyond normal measure, but never to the cost of others.
Going to the limit is something that Reus knows from his first career, as an extreme sports athlete. In 2015 he won the world championship in 24-hour endurance running. “I love setting a big goal for myself and then burning to achieve it. It’s no different with wine.” Here, too, he’s pursuing a path of no compromise. Wine was always an important star in his navigational firmament, which included an apprenticeship as a cooper at the Staatlichen Hofkeller in Würzburg.
But Reus put that aside for a time to pursue the life of a pro athlete and coach — which continues to subsidize his work as a winegrower. “I can’t live from one hectare of vineyards and 2,000 bottles of wine a year,” says Reus, who in 2018 returned to Franken after living near Frankfurt. His narrow cellar and old basket press may initially look like a hobby setup, but don’t be fooled: It is a cradle for highly distinctive wines from Chardonnay, Silvaner, and Weißburgunder that call to mind Mersault and Jura, but with a clear Franconian dialect. It is enthusiasts like these who will continue to drive young Franken forward.
Guaranteed.
Translated by weinstory.de
