German Pinot’s Pride and Prejudice

Can German Pinot Noir finally catch on or is forever fashionably spät(burgunder)?
Can German Pinot Noir finally catch on or is forever fashionably spät(burgunder)?
German-born but London-based, Anne Krebiehl MW is a freelance wine writer and lecturer. She covers Alsace, Germany, Austria, England and Grower Champagne for Vinous. She lectures, particularly on German wine, judges at international wine competitions and is a panel chair at the IWC. She loves high-acid wines and her work often focuses on Pinot Noir, Riesling, and traditional method sparkling wines. Her first book, The Wines of Germany (2019) won Domaine Faiveley International Wine Book Of The Year 2020 at the Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards.
Trained mason Tom Litwan began crafting elegant yet edgy, biodynamic, low-intervention Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays in Switzerland’s Aargau back in 2006. Today his wines play in the same league as top French and German producers. Normally, the Aargau is better known for its notoriously jammed locations along the A1 highway connecting Zürich with Bern and French-speaking Switzerland. The canton’s sole claim to gustatory fame is a carrot cake, Aargauer Rüeblitorte. Litwan’s decision to make wine here may initially surprise, but looking a bit closer, it actually makes a lot of sense. Before phylloxera bedeviled the old world at the end of…...
Trollinger was long decried as a poor excuse of a wine. Increasingly, growers and drinkers beg to differ.
Riesling is admired for its complexity, longevity, and ability to reflect its terroir. The same is slowly becoming true in the sparkling wine sector, where bubble enthusiasts are discovering what aged Rieslingsekt can offer. In the world of German wines, Riesling is the undisputed star. Still wines gained their historical reputation as early as the 15th century, while the 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the rise of traditional method sekt. Over time, large companies monopolized the production of cheap, tank-fermented sparkling wine, until smaller, individual wineries were finally allowed to produce and sell their sparkling wines in the early 1980s. This…...
The power, pride and potential of old vines. And it turns out, the Mosel really could be where it all started..
German Crémant is one of sparkling wine’s best-kept secrets. The high-quality classification requires strict hand harvesting and whole-bunch pressing to ensure that only the purest juice is used. Since its legalization over a decade ago, it has built a sparkling identity for itself, separate from its more established cousin Sekt. As one of the world’s best-selling sparkling style, crémant has at some point most likely graced your glass. Wine aficionados appreciate it for its delicate mousse, high quality, and ultimate value. Yet even among those who know and love crémant, few are aware that, far from being the sole property…...
Every guide to Swiss wine begins with the same emphatic but overly simple premise: there are six wine regions in Switzerland. That means one of them, Deutschschweiz, is forever miscast as a single entity, even though it encompasses 19 cantons and covers two-thirds of the nation’s surface area. Meanwhile, four of the other official regions are single cantons — Geneva, Vaud, Valais, and Ticino — each with its own story to tell; a sixth — the Three Lakes region — is geographically contiguous, linguistically mixed and, while quite small, celebrated for its diversity. Why, I ask, is there so little…...
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