Not many winemakers would decide to demonstrate what they had done wrong to a group of Masters of Wine and, probably even less forgiving, MW students. But that?s exactly what Dr Joachim Heger (pictured) travelled from the southern German region of Baden to the historic Vintners? Hall in the City of London to do last September.
 It has become traditional for the Annual General Meeting of the Institute of Masters of Wine to be preceded by an educational tasting. This year the theme was one unfamiliar to most Masters of Wine, German Spätburgunder, or Pinot Noir. This is a wine style that has changed out of all recognition in the last 10 years or so. Now that Germany is producing red wines that really are red as opposed to greyish pink, and smell ripe and fresh rather than sweet and tinged with rot, Spätburgunders have become some of the most popular wines of all in Germany – so popular that even though there is no shortage of wine (Germany produces almost as much still Pinot Noir as France does), both demand and prices in Germany are too high to encourage much export.
Big names - German Pinot Noir producers But some of Germany’s most admired Spätburgunder producers – Meyer-Näkel of the Ahr, Kloster Eberbach of the Rheingau, Fürst of Franken and Bernhard Huber and Dr Heger of Baden – brought over some great examples to titillate the palates assembled in London. Most of the 20 examples shown were from this century’s particularly successful vintages, such as 2007, 2005 and 2003 – although Dieter Greiner of Kloster Eberbach brought a fabulous 1959 from this state-owned enterprise’s historic Höllenberg vineyard in Assmannshausen. Joachim Heger, however, dutifully followed instructions to the letter: to make his tasting as educational as possible.
Spätburgunder renaissance continues He therefore showed us not just the highly successful 2005 vintage of the top bottling from his Ihringer Winklerberg vineyard and the transitional 2001 vintage, but also a 1999 that was probably quite flashy in youth but had already lost its fruit, and the really dried-out 1993. He admitted that in the 1990s, at the start of the Spätburgunder renaissance, he and most German winemakers had tended to pick too late, a hangover from Germany’s worship of high must weights for their white wines. They also tended to over-extract what was in the fruit, and used oak heavy handedly, too much like a seasoning rather than as a vessel with useful physical properties. ‘We used hi-tech methods then,’ he told us. ‘Today we use lo-tech methods, more or less like the way that 1959 was made.’ The other winemakers nodded in agreement
This was a particularly brave, public and dramatic demonstration of the way in which wines, winemaking styles and techniques have been evolving in recent years for this particular combination of variety and country, but it is very far from unusual. The only unusual aspect is that Dr Heger was so explicit in describing what he believed he had done wrong. (read in full length).
published with friendly authorization of author Jancis Robinson
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