Another debut English wine from @sophieevanss (see my last post about her Pinot Gris).

This is one of only 298 bottles produced. Like the Pinot Gris, this shows a bit of rubbery reduction on the nose. Unsurprisingly quite closed on the first day, but pure black and red cherry notes gradually unfurl themselves over the course of three days.

This spent 12 months in stainless steel, and it only weighs in at 10.7% abv, but this is anything but one-dimensional. Immensely pure on the palate. Balanced, mouth-watering acidity. The relatively low abv adds the sense of purity. The tannins need about 24 hours to emerge – they are light but bring added freshness and urgency. Slightly peppery, perfumed hints on day three.

Hard to describe – uncomplicated but complex, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Quite a dense body. More than the sum of its parts. This should be even better in five years’ time. But I only had bought one bottle, and life is too short.

#naturalwine #englishwinemovement #englishwine #pinotnoir #spätburgunder #pinotnero

Sophie Evans first came my attention via Instagram. She was working in Germany at 2Naturkinder, a winery in Franken, until fairly recently, dabbling more than a bit with Silvaner and its lesser-known cousin Blauer Silvaner. She has since returned to the UK, where she now farms a hectare of vineyard down in Kent, adopting the same biodynamic approach as her Franconian friends. I’ve never drunk anything from 2Naturkinder, but I know that their zero-sulphur wines have won admirers in this country. I need to order a bottle or two one day.

Sophie’s first English vintage was 2022. She has made three debut wines – ‘Electric Field’ (a field blend of Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir, Bacchus, and Reichensteiner); a Pinot Noir; and this Pinot Gris. She aged all three for 12 months, using demijohns and stainless steel. Unlike 2Naturkinder, she preferred the added insurance of a solitary pinch of sulphur before bottling (10 mg/l).

This Pinot Gris has an attractive hue of dark salmon merging into blood orange merging into amber – the result of 13 days of maceration involving gentle punchdowns. I get an ever-so-slight ‘natural’ whiff of volatile acidity and bruised apple skin after uncorking the bottle. But the nose also shows some reductive hints (think squash balls that have been thrashed around a squash court). This suggests that any funk will dissipate. Which indeed it does by the second evening. What follows is a touch of autumnal undergrowth along with some faint varietal hints – maybe peach, maybe even raspberry – that seem slightly candied. Oh, and wood varnish. Nice wood varnish. By the third and fourth evening, this has turned into something even finer. I would describe it as mahogany, accompanied by red apple skins and hints of pastry verging on marzipan.

This is bone dry on the palate, showing much of the above at various turns. A slight tannic tug lends structure and freshness. I love the fact that a medium body belies an innate inner density and sweetness of mouthfeel. By day four (that’s how many days the bottle was open), the volume seems to have a upped a notch while the mouthfeel is now silky. The finish is prolonged and satisfying.

This is a simple wine in the best sense, in that it oozes goodness and purity. Only 405 bottles were produced.

After planting 50 Chasselas vines in our front garden in 2000, last year finally saw our mini-vineyard kick into production. The following account of the 2023 vintage starts at the end and finishes at the beginning, before looking ahead to 2024.

Since the 2023 harvest, four demijohns of fledgling Chasselas have been standing on our upstairs landing. Three of these vessels contain five litres each; the fourth container holds three litres. All four are now filled up to the top. Apart from transferring wine into the three-litre demijohn as well as gradually adding surplus wine to every vessel, I have left the juice to do its own thing, more or less, since mid-October.

Each of these four batches remain on their primary lees – or ‘gross lees’ – and will continue to do so for months to come. The gross lees refers to the dead yeast cells (fine lees) as well as any other solids that have settled to the bottom of the vessel. Keeping the wine on the gross lees for such a length of time is a moot point – the juice is normally siphoned off the sediment early on to leave just the fine lees. The gross lees can impart off-notes or lead to bacterial spoilage, theoretically. But – and this is the thing – they also create a desirable reductive environment, the opposite of oxidative. There is a bit of chemistry involved that I don’t pretend to understand, but essentially the gross lees can help to condition the wine and make it more stable and resilient to oxidation later on. Such wines may appear quite closed in their youth but are built for a prolonged life. The lees also adds complexity and results in a rounder mouthfeel, provided you leave it in contact with the wine for long enough after fermentation. That stinky, eggy gas called hydrogen sulphide is a common by-product of reductive vinification. You can aerate the wine during fermentation to resolve the issue. I did this at first but then stopped. The whiff disappeared of its own accord anyway.

My use of the gross lees is born of necessity. I am just an amateurish one-man show, not a slick modern winery. As such, any natural means of keeping my wine fresh is welcome.

This approach has worked so far. My wine has not turned into vinegar yet. This is progress on last year’s more perfunctory effort involving a partially filled plastic bucket containing whole bunches, stems and all. (I won’t ever be going down that particular route again.) The glass of the demijohns is of course completely airtight, while the bungs and airlocks seem to be doing a good job of stopping or at least minimising oxygen ingress.

I aim to age the wine for about a year in order to extract full benefit from the gross lees – and be completely sure that fermentation is finished. The yeasts may or may not spring back into life during the warmer months, so I feel it’s best to give nature a wide berth while it takes its course. All going well, I should have some bottles ready for drinking by Christmas, although I am tempted to leave one of the five-litre batches on the lees for even longer than a year. Talking of yeasts: I’ve let the juice ferment naturally without any additions*, relying solely on the wild yeasts found on the grape skins and in the vicinity.

(* Actually, I’m telling a slight lie here: I added a pinch of universal wine yeast (GV1) to one of the five-litre batches. This was a mistake. Fermentation looked like it was ending, and I thought it was a good idea to add some cultured yeast to ensure that the wine fermented to complete dryness. Nothing notable happened; the additional yeast just sank to the bottom. The wine was pretty dry already. I should have been more confident in the wild yeasts doing their job.)

I only want to make one addition of sulphur to the wine, if at all, and – if indeed necessary – this will be just before bottling. Hopefully, ageing on the gross lees followed by bottling without filtration or fining will allow me to keep SO2 to an absolute minimum. On the other hand, the lower acidity in Chasselas is less conducive to the zero-sulphur approach as a rule (with notable exceptions), so the insurance of a little SO2 will help me sleep better at night.

Now let me rewind to the days of harvest and pressing in October.

Spontaneous fermentation and use of the gross lees necessitate clean, healthy, immaculate grapes. Although I was extremely happy with the quality of the fruit, I had to be vigilant in weeding out the odd rotten or wasp-damaged grape here and there. Earwigs and ladybirds had also made their homes inside a few of the more densely packed grape bunches. In practice, this meant destemming every single grape by hand. It’s lucky I only have 50 vines instead of 500 or 5,000. I completed this job within a week and a half, filling up large plastic buckets with beautiful Chasselas grapes in the process. By its very nature, destemming involves puncturing the grape skins, so fermentation likely got going within the seven to ten days before I began pressing the grapes.

Originally, my intention was to use a wooden basket press for the next stage. I discarded this idea for logistical and hygienic reasons, because I thought that cleaning such a contraption would be a pain. Instead, I bought a home fruit presser that was comprised of a flat, round stainless steel pressing plate, an outer stainless steel container with a spout, and a perforated inner stainless steel container in which to fill a nylon bag full of grapes. The containers and the nylon bag proved more useful than the pressing mechanism itself. The latter needed more pressure to be exerted than it was designed to take (and I was physically able to achieve). In the end, I resorted to putting countless handfuls of fruit inside the nylon bag and pressing successively by hand. A bit like foot-stomping, but micro-boutique style.

The growing season itself was a tale of two halves, or maybe three thirds. Firstly, a late spring negated any frost risk. The weather until July was very pleasant if often a little cold at night. This was ‘act one’, so to speak. The early mornings tended to be quite dewy, but the vines handled these conditions well.

The beginning of act two coincided with the start of the school summer holidays, as the weather turned inclement. It rained a lot, and daytime temperatures were regularly below 20°C. The deluge probably eased off a little in August, but we generally remained stuck under a conveyor belt of unsettled weather systems arriving from the Atlantic. At this point, I wasn’t expecting to harvest any time before the end of October. Although the vines were still doing fine, I was slightly wary of grapes inside some of the larger, more tightly packed clusters potentially bursting if the rain continued.

Any worries dissipated in September – one of the warmest Septembers in living memory. High temperatures boosted ripeness, while abundant sunshine dried the grapes and kept all major issues at bay. I picked on 4 October.

The white mulch is lamb’s wool.

This all sounds like a walk in park, but the end result owed everything to the many hours I invested outside in the garden throughout the growing season. In the past couple of years, I have experimented with spraying various teas made from plants picked in the garden or sourced around the village: horsetail, nettles, comfrey, dandelion, willow, yarrow – that sort of thing. I like to think that the trace elements in these decoctions strengthen the vines to a certain extent. But when it comes to the best disease prevention, nothing beats keeping the vine canopy as light and airy as possible. I do this by plucking out all side (lateral) shoots that grow from the fruit-bearing primary shoots, ensuring that the canopy is spaced out as evenly as possible, and stripping off leaves to a certain extent. Vines like to do their own thing, and Chasselas vines in particular love throwing out lateral shoots. Keep these and the canopy can quickly turn into a mini-jungle. I only give lateral shoots a chance to grow at the top of the canopy, but even then I will intervene if necessary because these younger shoots are always more prone to mildew if the conditions are less than perfect – which was certainly the case in July and August.

I cannot emphasise enough how important how this mundane procedure of plucking off shoots is to me now. As a result, I barely sprayed anything all summer with the exception of three or four rounds of organic magnesium sulphate (Epsom salt) early on to curb any magnesium deficiencies – a particular problem in 2021.

Looking ahead to 2024, it won’t be long before I turn my mind to pruning again. Based on experiences thus far, I probably prefer laying down two productive canes (double Guyot method) over one (single Guyot). For my specific purposes, the vine and its canopy are more balanced with two canes. With about four or five shoots growing from just one cane, there will be a much bigger discrepancy in strength between the first and the last shoot on the cane. With two or no more than three shoots growing from each of two canes respectively, there is a lot more consistency despite the final bud showing a little more vigour than the first bud (I lay the canes down flat). Ideally, I would convert all the singles to doubles this year, but growth of the replacement canes for 2024 was erratic to say the least. The idea is for two spurs on either side of the head of the vine to produce one cane each for the next year, yet a lot of the vines simply refuse to play ball, only producing one viable cane at most. Then you have some weaker vines that are not yet up to full capacity and still have an incomplete ‘architecture’. These vines are even less interested in producing shoots where you want them to. “Vines will vine!” as someone I follow on Instagram, Dylan Grigg, writes, eluding to the vine’s evolutionary trait as a plant forever striving to grow higher and higher. I may start converting these weaker vines from Guyot to cordon/spur pruning to use this trait more to my advantage and build up strength through a higher proportion of old wood. Once I get these stragglers working for me, the vineyard should be well and truly established.

Forgeurac, alias Uwe Lange and Marco Pfliehinger, are based in St. Leon-Rot in northern Baden, not far from Heidelberg. Their cellar is situated underneath the village blacksmith’s, hence the ‘forge’ in Forgeurac. (By the way, I once had a job interview in St. Leon-Rot. Nothing to do with wine. It didn’t go very well. The job wasn’t for me, so that’s ok.)

Lange and Pfliehinger farm vineyards along the entire length of Baden, with plots in the Kraichgau district, in the Bühlertal valley, and in Markgräflerland on Jurassic limestone soils near Efringen-Kirchen. They also have holdings across the way in Württemberg (Weinsberg, to be precise).

This is their entry-level Pinot, sourced from younger vines and from plots other than those used for the duo’s single-vineyard bottlings. Medium to deep ruby in appearance. Chalky undertones and dark, small berries on the nose (blackcurrant, blackberry). There’s a hint of juniper too. The forest fruit whiff becomes sweeter after a day or so. Very nice. Creamy mouthfeel with much of the aforementioned fruit, albeit with more of a herbal twist. The tannins are balanced between fine-grained and grippy, affording good drinkability as well as tension and freshness. Personally, I tend to be more of a fan of juicy, bright, ‘feminine’ Pinots with red-fruit characteristics, but this dark-fruited Spätburgunder is very serious and very good. I should probably try a couple of their more expensive wines before too long.

A very short note from the Pfalz, with a Riesling from the heart of the classic Mittelhaardt district.

Floral and white peach nose on day one, opening up the next day to reveal red peach, apricot, red apple and green tea, followed by crushed rock on day three. Peach and candied lemon on the palate, with nice acidity. This wine is sunny, juicy and succulent, but certainly needs air. Good length on the finish.

Michael Andres (www.andres-wein.de) farms according to biodynamic principles. He also produces excellent sparkling wine with his long-time friend and colleague Stefan Mugler (www.andresundmugler.de).

Andres owns 0.8 hectares in Reiterpfad, which is a bona fide grand cru. This is a warm, dry site with a stony Buntsandstein (coloured sandstone) topsoil and a red clay subsoil.

Buntsandstein is a ubiquitous part of Pfalz geology. The southern half of the Pfälzer Wald (Palatinate Forest) is home to its most obvious incarnations: countless castles, cliffs, rock formations, and rocky outcrops of red sandstone, all ablaze in the evening sun. It becomes more of a beige-coloured sandstone, the further north you head towards the classic district of the Mittelhaardt, where Frank John and family are based.

Frank John was the winemaker at Von Buhl when I did a four-week internship there in my early 20s during the summer of 1997. I have positive memories of Herr John – a very calm, and calming, figure at a winery that was re-emerging from a period of relative mediocrity. John was the subject of a recent podcast (I can very much recommend it if you understand German; here’s the link). As he tells interviewer Wolfgang Staudt, the Von Buhl cellars in the 1990s were suddenly full of spanking new stainless-steel vats thanks to an injection of cash from Japanese investors who began leasing the estate in 1989. There were no wooden vessels at all. John and Von Buhl eventually parted ways in 2002. It seems that the then management did not necessarily share all of John’s eco-friendly convictions.

I tasted this wine gradually over seven days but only made notes on three of them. Initial iodine and peaty notes on the nose, followed by red fruit (mostly raspberry), honey, and wax. Day two: herbal aromas, maybe a hint of quince along with dried fruit (peach or apricot, not sure). Day seven: beeswax, succulent red peach, and herbs.

Very dry on the palate. Most of the above but with less fruit and more of the same iodine tang. Mouthwateringly fresh, with a subtle bitter twist and herbal, almost medicinal character. The wine has also acquired a greater generosity since 2019 when I drank the first bottle. But there is not an ounce of fat.

This excellent wine still has years ahead of it and certainly further ageing potential.

Hand-picked grapes. Wild-yeast fermentation, including malolactic fermentation, in 1,200- and 1,400-litre oak casks, with a proportion of whole bunches. Maturation on the gross lees for one year. Minimal addition of sulphur.

Now for an update on our vineyard, namely the 50 Chasselas vines that we (i.e. Jenny and I) planted in our front garden during the height of the first Covid lockdown in April 2020. (If I’m honest, it still feels a bit weird to be calling it a ‘vineyard’, given that the plot of vines is so tiny.)

In hindsight, the vine protectors were a bit of an overkill

Our vines have been in the ground for over 33 months, or three growing seasons, the last two of which have been a particularly sharp learning curve – 2021 and 2022 could not have been more different. The former was wet and cool, the latter hot and dry. Disease pressure was a problem in summer 2021. Chasselas is certainly known to be vulnerable to mildew, but the issues I had were mostly home-made. Once the shoots had reached a cuttable height above the trellis, I thought it would be a good idea to wrap them around the highest catch wires and let them continue growing. This approach, known as tressage (or braiding), means that the tips of the shoots are retained. The theory is that cutting off the tops of the shoots otherwise stresses the vines into producing a surplus of lateral shoots that will eventually crowd out the leaf canopy. And a crowded canopy means a greater chance of disease. The grape clusters also tend to be more compact as a result, which increases the risk of botrytis, or bunch rot. However, the only effect of tressage that I could ascertain was that the top area of the trellis simply became a mildew-prone, mildew-infested jungle. This was downy mildew (Peronospora), I should add; powdery mildew has been non-existent in our plot since we planted.

Tressage – looks lovely, don’t try it at home

Magnesium deficiency was another symptom of letting the vegetative growth of these young vines continue unchecked. This manifested itself on the vine leaves, which turned increasingly yellow. This, in turn, left the vegetation even more prone to downy. In short, the vines looked a mess and were already shedding leaves by the end of September 2021. I picked up all the infected vine leaves that dropped that autumn. From all 50 vines.

Messy, mildew-prone and magnesium-deficient

I already knew that the soil in our front garden was exceedingly well drained. Any rain, however hard and prolonged, seeps down very quickly. Almost too quickly. Leaving the area directly under the vines clear of grass and other plants only exacerbated this effect. Concluding that the cumulative deluge of summer 2021 had probably leached the soil of nutrients including magnesium, I decided to fill in the gaps permanently with a mixture of wild flowers and grasses. There were various motives for doing this. From the most basic perspective, a more diverse array of green cover underneath the vines – supplementing my grass-and-clover cover between the rows – helps to retain soil moisture and aerate the soil. Extensive root systems and their vast subterranean kingdom of mycorrhizal fungi are difficult to fathom or comprehend but a boon for soil life and soil nutrition, based on what I have already seen with my own eyes. Deeper-rooting plants like yarrow and the nitrogen-fixer sainfoin were also included in the seed mixture. I additionally sowed a little dandelion separately underneath the rows. The aim was that these would give the vines some competition and help to temper their vigour. Just as importantly, a greater diversity of plants should attract a greater diversity of insects and birds, which in turn have the self-regulating effect of keeping potential pests (like leaf-munching caterpillars) at bay.

Happier times in 2021

At this juncture, it is worth pointing out that the vines are divided into two distinct locations: 47 are situated in the main front-garden plot, while three grow along a narrow strip bordering our front drive nearer the road. We call this triumvirate ‘The Random Three’. Originally, the plan was to have all 50 vines in one plot, but we simply ran out of space. The Random Three lead a charmed life. Planted in quite fertile soil outside the main plot, they are each being trained up a single stake and are spaced one metre apart in a row instead of the intra-row spacing of 80 cm that applies to all the other vines. I have chosen to spur-prune The Random Three as bush vines, albeit with the aforementioned stake used to train the vegetation upwards and tie the shoots together with string. This gobelet sur échalas style persists in places like the Northern Rhône and – surprise, surprise – the shores of Lake Geneva, the purported birthplace of Chasselas. One of The Random Three, the nearest one to our house, is already living its best life and looks more than capable of supporting a whopping six two-bud spurs, or 12 primary shoots, from 2023 onwards. Apart from the aesthetic pleasure I get from shaping the vine’s architecture through spur pruning, the advantage of training a vine in this way is that the grapes receive almost 360-degree exposure to direct or indirect light. The only fly in the ointment is the proximity of one of our neighbours’ conifers. The people next door have kindly pruned all four of their adjacent conifers within the last couple of years, I hasten to add. Be that as it may, I would ban all conifers if I ruled the world.

The Random Three – the one on the right is particularly happy

By spring 2022, it was clear that the other 47 vines were growing up at markedly different speeds. About a dozen needed pruning back to two potential buds due to weak growth in the previous year. With the others, I generally took the two canes that had grown the previous year and cut both of these down to two, three or, in a few isolated cases, four potential buds respectively. What was generally left was a V shape of two spurs. The aim during the 2022 season was to have both spurs each producing a potential cane and spur for the next year respectively.

This approach was down to circumstance rather than design. With a fruiting wire only 40 cm above the ground, it dawned on me in 2021 that a single vine trunk would have to be exceedingly short and stumpy if I were to train the vines with replacement canes every year according to the Guyot method while having a spur branch out on either side of the trunk no less than 15 to 20 cm under the wire (see illustration near the end of this blog post). Starting with a V shape would allow me to use the space more efficiently. It would also set in motion the sideways branching that occurs when you practise a gentler form of pruning to protect sap flow in the vine.

V for victory

In practice, a few would-be spurs for 2023 failed to materialise. Acrotony, whereby the uppermost fruiting buds on one-year-old wood develop first, was particularly evident in 2022. Only the top bud developed into a new shoot in one or two cases, with no growth further down. Most of the potential three-bud spurs produced only two buds. The third one at the bottom failed to emerge or only produced a little stubbly twig. Consequently, I was unable to obtain some of my desired spur positions for 2023. This is no big drama as such, but it will necessitate some creative choices come pruning this March.

Due to the tressage-induced mildew debacle of 2021, my aim for the 2022 growing season was to remove all laterals (side shoots) until the primary shoots started approaching the top wires. I had no wish to give Peronospora even a sniff. Secondly, I was going to cut off the tops of the shoots once they started overhanging the rows. The tressage experiment in year 2 was worth it for experience sake but not something I was going to repeat. Thirdly, I wanted to preclude any magnesium deficiency by applying magnesium sulphate (Epsom salts) as a foliar spray at least until fruit set. This purely organic, non-chemical treatment would replenish any magnesium shortage during the energy-intensive early growth phase in May and June. Ideally, the diverse ground cover will naturally balance out the soil in the long term. We also have a composter (note to self: I need to start filling it at some point). But Epsom will do for now as a preventive measure.

Mid-summer 2022

In the event, the record-breaking hot, dry summer of 2022 did my work for me. After a spring without any problematic frosts, vegetative growth almost ground to a halt by the end of the July anyway. The vines were conserving energy amid soaring temperatures. Out of the 47 vines in the main plot, less than half managed to reach the top wire. I had already stopped with the Epsom salts well before July but continued applying other natural spays every so often: nettle, chamomile, dandelion and yarrow – just for basic nutrition and not for any other reason, because there was no disease pressure whatsoever, nor any major symptoms of magnesium deficiency for that matter.

Hanging on in there in early August 2022

I’d be lying if I said that drought wasn’t a concern. After all, the vines still have relatively shallow root systems. The 2022 vintage was also the first year to produce a crop. Admittedly, it was a tiny crop of only around 70 very small, loosely clustered bunches of Chasselas. Yet the vines coped admirably. I daresay the shutdown in growth helped them to ripen the fruit even more efficiently. While most of the vegetation at ground level turned yellow, the vines remained an oasis of green throughout the summer. If they can withstand such a broiling hot summer, this augurs well for the future. I suspect they will continue to adapt to circumstances and find their own balance in time amid the yarrow, the dandelions, the ryegrass, the wispy grass, the sainfoin, the clover, etc.

I picked my first-ever crop on 4 October 2022 – a small harvest that fitted into two large salad bowls. Half of the grapes I destemmed by hand, the other half I left as whole bunches. Into a five-litre plastic fermentation bucket they all went, filling barely half of the container. After leaving the bucket outdoors for the first night (a very chilly night), I decided to bring the harvest back inside. This was a good idea, as wild-yeast fermentation kicked in shortly after. Since then, the bucket has been ensconced in our front room and the juice has continued to ferment on the skins. I began pressing the grapes properly by hand shortly before Christmas. This process will continue for a while yet. At some stage, I will need to think about filtering the currently brown-coloured juice from the equally brown detritus of skins, stems and pips. A muslin cloth may come in useful. In the meantime, the inside of the fermentation bucket certainly smells much better than it looks. The alcoholic whiff is heady and fills the entire room whenever I open the lid. There has been no bacterial spoilage so far, as far as I can tell. Without getting too technical, the skins and stems in particular help to protect and preserve the juice from oxidation while conditioning the wine for a longer life. Whether I eventually manage to produce a couple of bottles of skin-contact ‘orange wine’ from the 2022 vintage remains to be seen.

Two salad bowls worth of grapes

Circumstances dictate this ad hoc approach. Maybe I will reduce the amount of skin contact in future when the crops increase in size and I upsize my ‘winemaking’ facilities and equipment into something more bespoke.

Gooseberry conserve, anyone?

Looking ahead

I love pruning the vines. I love the time and thought that goes into creating and maintaining their shape. This spring should see me laying down one or two shoots per vine as canes for the 2023 growing season. With a total of four primary shoots already growing from the left-hand and right-hand spurs, I will leave either four shoots to grow from a single cane (‘single Guyot’) or two shoots from each of two canes (‘double Guyot’). Either way, it will leave me with a maximum of eight shoots per vine. However, some vines aren’t quite ready for that yet. In particular, there are about three or four vines that need pruning back to two potential buds again. I suspect one of them is suffering from faulty grafting, whereby the graft connecting the European Vitis vinifera cultivar (Chasselas) with the North American phylloxera-resistant rootstock (SO4) is of poor quality. This is a problem that will have originated at the vine nursery, not in our garden. I may have to replace the vine in question next year.

This is what I have in mind for 2023

Another question in my mind is how vigorous the vines really are. Growth was fast and prolific in 2021 with hundreds of litres of rain and an absence of under-vine ground cover. It was slow and meagre in 2022 amid the competition of ground cover coupled with a hot, dry growing season. I think the truth will eventually lie somewhere in between these two extremes once the vines have more years under their belt in their new surroundings. This is why I am favouring cane pruning over spur pruning for the time being, as the former affords me greater flexibility in terms of the number of potential shoots I wish to leave on each vine. Once you have permanent spur positions, it is very hard to revert to cane pruning without mutilating the vine, which is the last thing I want. Having said this, I can well imagine moving to permanent cordons with two spur positions on either side of the vine in the fullness of time. When this method works, it works really well. It usually involves pruning wood no older than two years old, whereas cane pruning can entail cutting three-year-old wood. The older the wood, the more significant the pruning wound. This is why world’s oldest vines tend to be spur-pruned.

Anyway, roll on 2023.

Perfumed on the nose. Initial impressions of lilac, quince, fennel and yellow plum. Lychee and pineapple emerge on the second day. Dry, saline and smoky on the palate, with considerable density for a wine with 11.5% abv. Melon and pear notes gradually emerge – almost like a Grauburgunder. Lovely generosity. Exotic notes of lychee again. Bone dry. Some lactic notes, relatively low acidity – medium at the very most, but held together by notable phenolics. Simple but fine.

This entry-level bottling was my first-ever Teschke wine, I am ashamed to say. Michael Teschke’s reputation goes before him as a 21st-century pioneer of Silvaner. (Teschke prefers the international spelling, with a y.) Blauer Silvaner is a less common mutation of the better-known (Grüner) Silvaner. At peak ripeness, the grapes look a bit like Grauburgunder/Pinot Gris/Pinot Grigio at the same stage. To be honest, I can only think of a couple of other wineries that grow Blauer Silvaner: Weingut Reinhold & Cornelia Scheider and Weingut Abril, both on the Kaiserstuhl in Baden.

Unfortunately, Michael Teschke recently took the decision to sell nearly all of his vineyard holdings. To paraphrase an open letter that he wrote to one of his main retailers in Germany, it looks like Herr Teschke basically came to the conclusion that the blood, sweat and tears that he had invested in his vocation was simply unsustainable both from a financial and emotional point of view.

This wine is unfiltered and unfined. Its pale lemon hue is matt in appearance, not gloss. Intense nose of quince, beeswax and blossom, with hints of chamomile – developing out over time to show a resinous character. Salty, sour beer on the palate, along with more quince. Quite refreshing, pithy acidity. The wine’s low alcohol (10%) belies its medium body and concentrated, almost silky mouthfeel. There is also notable phenolic grip (white ‘tannins’). Suggestions of caramel as well. The finish is long, satisfyingly sour, and moreish. This would go well with a salty Bretzel.

Stefan Vetter’s reputation goes before him as a producer of scintillating natural wine – a genre that suits Sylvaner more than most other varieties I can think of. A lot of Sylvaners I’ve had in my time have been on the earthy, riper side. This specimen is a totally different creature. Saline, pure and really quite interesting.

Schwarzer Herrgott is one of the great 21st-century German terroirs – located in Zellertal, the most northerly part of the Pfalz. Divine in name, divine in quality. The Zellertal is quite a valley running from west to east, with the south-facing vineyards enjoying optimum sunshine in the rain shadow of the nearby Donnersberg mountain – the highest elevation in the Pfalz. Like other notable patches of the ‘Nordpfalz’, limestone is the predominant bedrock.

By the way, this is the Pfälzer iteration of Schwarzer Herrgott in the village of Zell. There is also a Rheinhessen Schwarzer Herrgott – a GG no less, referred to as ‘Zellerweg im Schwarzen Herrgott’, situated only a kilometre or two away, officially part of the Rheinhessen village of Mölsheim, and made famous by Weingut Battenfeld-Spanier with a Grosses Gewächs (GG) of the same name.

Vivid medium lemon in appearance, with an intense nose of wet chalk and lemon, with herbal essential oil and slightly vegetative hints. These are beautiful, pure aromas. Lemon continues on a concentrated, medium- to full-bodied palate, along with the aforementioned chalk expressed as a sort of silky film coating the teeth and mouth. Electrifying acidity with ample volume, leading to a long-lasting finish. A grand cru in all but name.

13.5% abv