German winemakers don’t normally express themselves in drastic terms, but when I started tasting the 2021 vintage whites in the summer, several of them had some pretty extreme things to say about the year.
“It was a bitch of a growing season, but turned into a Cinderella vintage,” one said, immediately begging for anonymity out of fear of blowback from colleagues angry that the truth had been stated so bluntly.
Why the B-word? The worst aspect of the 2021 growing season, and the root of many subsequent problems, was the long rainy period through June and the first half of July. When this kind of weather pattern happened a generation ago, daytime temperatures would have been cool, but in the new climate situation they often pushed 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit). Warmth is the accelerator for the growth of fungi, including downy mildew, which spread with brutal speed.
Whatever producers sprayed with (and even organic producers have to spray against downy mildew – with copper), it was impossible to avoid both some loss of crop and damage to the canopy. Those producers who were slapdash with spraying suffered up to 100 percent crop loss. I remember jogging through the vineyards of the Southern Pfalz during the first days of July 2021 and being shocked by the severe damage. I had never seen anything like it
“After the heavy rain stopped we had some almost tropical weather, then you had to watch out for powdery mildew,” said Johannes Leitz of the Leitz estate in Rudesheim, in Germany’s Rheingau region. He was one of the producers who was right on top of these problems in his own vineyards.
At the end of August, I saw some vineyards with both downy and powdery mildew damage, and during the following weeks ignoble botrytis sometimes joined in the fungal party. These problems had a lot to do with soils being full of rainwater starting in the early summer.
So what made that anonymous winemaker call 2021 a Cinderella vintage? Well, for those growers whose grapes survived the mildew attacks and stayed clean, the fine fall weather was a game-changer. It flipped the vintage dramatically in a way nobody expected.
“It got really good from late October onward,” said Johannes Selbach of Selbach-Oster in Zeltingen, in the Mosel region. “It was the first time in many years that we continued picking into the second half of November.”
READ MORE THE GOOD, THE GREAT AND THE UGLY: GERMANY’S SCHIZOPHRENIC 2020 VINTAGE
Selbach was not the only leading grower to describe the 2021 vintage as “classic” and “like in the old days before climate change.” Likewise, many winemakers acknowledged that the reduced crop helped with ripening in October and November.
Selbach-Oster’s five dry riesling GGs from the 2021 vintage are excellent examples of what was possible if you managed your vineyards well and waited for full ripeness, and the Selbach-Oster Riesling Mosel Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Trockenbeerenauslese 2021 is a great dry Mosel wine. The often high acidity of the vintage also created an excellent basis for making great off-dry rieslings like the staggeringly succulent, yet intensely flinty Selbach-Oster Riesling Mosel Schmitt 2021.
The combination of top dry and nobly-sweet rieslings also made the stunning range from Gunter Kunstler in the town of Hochheim in the Rheingau stand out. Some of his highlights were due to new vineyard holdings, in particular two hectares in the world-famous Marcobrunn site, which gave both an abundant crop of the amazingly powerful and complex Künstler Riesling Rheingau Marcobrunn GG 2021, and a very limited production of the perfect Künstler Riesling Rheingau Erbacher Marcobrunn Auslese 2021. Altogether, the Rheingau is on a roll!
Another star achiever was, unsurprisingly, Klaus-Peter Keller of the Keller estate in Florsheim-Dalsheim in Germany’s largest wine region, Rheinhessen. He produced two perfect dry riesling GGs in decent quantities, most notably the Keller Riesling Rheinhessen Pettenthal GG 2021 from Nierstein on the eastern edge of the region. This sub-region of Rheinhessen shone brightly in 2021. Asked to explain his success Klaus-Peter said, “You had to go with small yields and to wait. Either you complain, or you really do something like we did.”
If I had to name one region as the star of 2021 in Germany, then it would be the Nahe wine region. All the famous producers from Diel and Donnhoff to Jacob Schneider and Tesch performed very well. One reason for this was the comparatively low rainfall there. In the Nahe village of Norheim, for example, the annual rainfall was only 494mm, which was more than 300mm below the average. In comparison, in the tiny Ahr region close to Bonn, where there was a catastrophic flood on July 15, total rainfall in 2021 was almost 795mm, or 27 percent higher than normal.
“We feared that the comparatively low rainfall here would result in 2021 wines low in extract with a challenging acidity, but we were amazed to find the opposite,” said Karsten Peter, the chief winemaker at Gut Hermannsberg in Nahe. “They have more than enough extract to balance the acidity.”
His Gut Hermannsberg Riesling Nahe Vom Vulkan Trocken 2021 is a standout in the dry village wine category and an excellent introduction to the vintage.
Many of Germany’s leading winemakers rose to such challenges, and sometimes they surprised themselves with how well the wines turned out. However, if you scroll down to the bottom of the more then 1,500 tasting notes below, you slam into the other side of the 2021 vintage.
I think there were two quality problems. First, in order to have good quantities of entry-level wines, some of Germany’s well-known producers work with contract growers, vinifying the grapes they supply. In 2021 they were sometimes not entirely clean, and even excellent winemaking couldn’t prevent a hint of murkiness from botrytis landing in the finished wine.
READ MORE THE OTHER GREAT PINOT NOIR: TASTING BACK TO THE GOLDEN AGE OF GERMANY’S SPATBURGUNDER
The other problem was at large producers, who only work with their own grapes. There the top vineyards tended to be picked at the ideal time, but there were also lots of early-picked wines in the cellar with high acidity, which made them edgy. Of course, both groups of wines rated below 90 points.
Finally, there’s the quantity problem, resulting from the small yields. The production figures for a great many of the highest-rated wines in this report are only a few hundred bottles, like some Grand Cru Burgundies. Germany has a long tradition of very small bottlings for nobly sweet Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese wines. Now the same approach is now being applied to everything from dry GGs to light, off-dry Kabinett wines. Hunting some of them down could be very hard work! We suggest you hurry.
In total, we gave 10 German wines perfect scores – all rieslings and all from the 2021 vintage – out of the 1,894 bottles we uncorked over the past year. And although 2021 rieslings comprise the lion’s share of our top-ranked wines, we tasted plenty of other vintages from a wide spread of varietals. Have a look at the notes below to get the full picture…
– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor
Note: You can sort the wines below by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.
