Pot pourri

Apologies for the huge break again inbetween posts. It's been an eventful few weeks for me, and it's been hard to keep track. Anyway, I eventually got through the six bottles from Wiesloch, plus I've started on a couple of wines from the winery in Bad Dürkheim. Unfortunately, I didn't make proper notes, so the following is more or less based on memory. Featured are three Wiesloch wines, plus one from Weingut Pfeffingen. I'm refraining from giving scores, though I may start doing that for other wines in future, probably according to the 100-point Parker scale:

Großsachsener Rittersberg Weißburgunder Kabinett trocken 2007
Nice flinty aromas with yellow fruit. Elegant.














Wieslocher Spitzenberg Riesling Kabinett halbtrocken 2007
Light, spritzy, well balanced with nice fruit. Sensorically speaking, still dry, despite being a halbtrocken.



















Zeuterner Mannaberg Müller-Thurgau QbA halbtrocken
"Uergh, a Müller-Thurgau!", I hear you say, and not even bone dry. How uncouth. But how this wine surprised me... Pears! And I don't mean that pear-drop whiff of sulphur you sometimes get with recently bottled wine, but lovely succulent September orchard pears. Most pleasant and most surprising. Definitely not for wine snobs.



















Weingut Pfeffingen, Ungsteiner Herrenberg Riesling Kabinett trocken 2007
This just oozes class. The label - which recently underwent a face-lift - is quite un-Germanic. Cleverly, it uses a back label to show all the information every German winery is legally bound to include. Lovely minerally characteristics, quite elegant, but with that characteristic Pfalz oomph.

German red wins international pinot noir prize

Yes, that's correct. A Dernauer Pfarrwingert Spätburgunder Großes Gewächs 2005 by Weingut Mayer-Näkel beat all-comers including the best Burgundy, Chile and New Zealand had to offer. This result maybe isn't as cataclysmic a the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, but it's certainly a feather on the cap of the German wine industry. I think the wine in question costs about EUR 48 (about GBP 40 when you add on all the duty), which I suppose is probably just as well. Reassuringly expensive, you could say.

The most astonishing aspect about this is probably the fact that the region where the wine was produced, the Ahr, is situated only just south of Bonn. The vineyards there are vertiginous, however, with volcanic slate soil. And the Dernauer Pfarrwingert vineyard specifically is, by all accounts, a veritable sun-trap.

Manna from heaven?

Heidelberger Mannaberg Spätburgunder Weißherbst 2006

Check this out, an off-dry pinot noir rose.

This was the first from the aforementioned Wiesloch selection I've tried. Wiesloch is a town situated just south of Heidelberg on the western borders of what is known as the Kraichgau.

Now, the first thing that caught the eye with this wine was its name, Mannaberg - apparently a Großlage situated south of Heidelberg, taking in the towns of Leimen (where Boris Becker grew up) and Rohrbach. So, was it Manna from heaven..?

Well, I would class this as the sort of wine you could drink quite happily on your balcony or in your garden on a barmy summer's evening. Nothing remotely star quality about it, but a wine like this doesn't need to be. There's definitely room in my fridge for wine like this. I don't want you thinking I quaff Clos Sainte Hune all the time... Virtually brick orange in colour (see photo), it was refreshing on the nose, mainly showing what I think may have been melon. Nice clean palate. Still redolent of some sort of melon.

According to the Wieslocher Winzerkeller website, this wine is EUR 3.50 (though I got it for free), and is reminiscent of ripe strawberries, not melons. There's no accounting for taste.

Bonanza

Thanks to a good contact from Heidelberg who visited yesterday en route to the England-Andorra match in Barcelona today, I've been able to procure 12 bottles of white wine - six bottles of which are assorted 2007-vintage rieslings (three dry kabinetts, two off-dry kabinetts - my favourite! - and a dry spätlese) from family winery Weingut Pfeffingen from Bad Dürkheim, and the other being a pot-pourri of local wines from Winzerkeller Wiesloch in deepest Kraichgau (Riesling,Weißburgunder, Grauburgunder, a Spätburgunder pinky...even a Mülller-Thurgau, for heaven's sake). I look forward to tasting some of them over the coming weeks.

Mosel eat your heart out

Weiler Schlipf

Wine in Germany - death of a tradition?

I spotted this old thread in the American Rob Parker forum run by Mark Squires. I must admit, I'm with Terry Theise and David Schildknecht on this one.

Cracking wine for under 5 euro

This has to be one of the best red wines under 5 euro I have ever tasted.
A 2006 Oberrotweiler Henkenberg Spätburgunder trocken from the Kaiserstuhl region. Cost EUR 4.99.
Lovely and smooth with plenty of complexity. Produced by the Kaiserstühler Winzerverein in Oberrotweil, it outshines the most of the fare the competing wine cooperatives in and around Weil produce for the same price. You'd also be hard-pushed to find a pinot as good as this under 10 pounds in the UK.