Germany 2024 Tasting Report: The Pursuit of Perfection

Scroll quickly through the tasting notes for the highest-rated wines in this year’s Germany Report and your eyes might pop out. At first glance, it might look as if Germany’s 2023 vintage for whites and 2022 vintage for reds are the greatest of modern times, so numerous are the wines with high ratings. What happened?

Two stories are so intertwined here, and they need careful teasing apart. The first of these is the fact that both these vintages are excellent. 2023 is the best for dry whites since 2019, which itself was the best since 2007 or maybe even 2001. And 2022 might be equally good for reds.

At JamesSuckling.com, our experience is that producers almost never make wines that rate 98, 99 or 100 points by accident. They need to actively pursue the highest excellence with great determination, plus they have to take some serious risks and break with certain conventions to get there. That’s the basis of all our best stories!

James and I have been following the German wine industry’s development since the early 1980s, when only a handful of producers had that kind of uncompromising commitment to quality. Until the end of the last century the quality fanatics among Germany’s winemakers were lone wolves in their own regions, and their number increased only very slowly.

But at the last turn of the century something fundamentally changed, and networks of young winemakers who freely exchanged ideas and experience suddenly popped up all over. The ethos of, “We are stronger together than I can ever be alone” turbocharged the push for top quality. Terroir, or the special taste of the vineyard location, was their creed, but they were also deeply committed to dry wines.

Yes, mistakes were made, such as pushing for too much grape ripeness, or doing too much skin contact for dry whites, or color and tannin extraction for reds, but producers quickly and collectively learned from them.

Over the past decade, many of these 21^st-century winemakers have matured, and so has the greatness of their wines.

I’m sure that some of you could smelt a big "but" coming up fast. You see, only a handful of the German wines that received the highest ratings this year were produced in a serious quantity that make global distribution possible. Many of these wines are bottlings of a single 500-, 600-, 1000- or 1200-liter casks (traditional cask sizes in Germany).

One is the Künstler Riesling Rheingau Hölle GG 2023, of which more than 1,000 twelve-bottle cases were produced, and the other is the Wittmann Riesling Rheinhessen Morstein GG 2023, which is not far behind in terms of quantity. Here are two perfect dry German rieslings you can actually buy! And they share the virtues of the 2023 vintage: excellent concentration but moderate alcohol, combined with terrific elegance and subtlety.

So what is behind the limited-edition bottlings of spectacular German wines? Here, too, there is no simple answer. Certainly the G-Max from Keller in Rheinhessen is a role model. 2001 was the first vintage of what is now the world’s most expensive dry riesling. The typical annual production of this wine has always been a well-used, 1,000-liter oak cask – in some vintages a bit less, in others a bit more.

Of course, other producers didn’t miss the way the enormous demand for G-Max helped drive up the prices for all the Keller family’s single-vineyard wines on the secondary market, and some of them set out to emulate it. What a surprise! Another surprise is that not all of Keller's wines are of very limited production. For example, there's a sizable quantity of the Kirchspiel GG and Oberer Hubacker GG.

There’s another side of this equation though, and that is how the inheritance law introduced to Germany by Napoleon in the first years of the 19th century – equal division of property between all heirs – led to the splintering of vineyard holdings. Vineyard parcels that are only a small fraction of a hectare are common.

For example, the Von Oetinger winery in the Rheingau only has 0.2 hectares of vines in the  legendary Marcobrunn site. To reach optimum quality, Achim von Oetinger harvests only about 25 hectoliters per hectare. This meant that there was just one 500-liter cask from which just 666 bottles of the mind-blowingly powerful but beautifully balanced Von Oetinger Riesling Rheingau Marcobrunn GG 2023 were filled.

I could give any number of other examples of this phenomenon, particularly common in the Mosel. A great many wines from Julian Haart and Gunther Steinmetz also fall into this category. Even a large Mosel producer like Markus Molitor has a bunch of such stunning, limited-edition wines.

This is no unique phenomenon in the world of wine, in fact, it’s just the same as in Burgundy. For example, Christophe Roumier in Chambolle-Musigny in the Cote de Nuits produced just two barrels, or about 608 bottles, of Musigny Grand Cru in 2023. And that’s rather normal for him.

We have absolutely nothing against him or this wine, but we don’t rate it because it’s almost impossible to buy. Wine-Searcher gives the average bottle price for all vintages as just over $16,000, while the $115 average global price for the Von Oetinger Marcobrunn makes it looks like a bargain. It’s a mad wine world, even in Germany!

There always were single-barrel bottlings for the German dessert wine categories of Auslese, Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese. What is new is how this practice has been extended to dry wines, and how rapidly cults developed around many of these new wines. Collectors recently became excited about limited-edition German wines in a similar was to their longstanding infatuation with limited edition Burgundy wines. Clearly, hard-to-get is hard to resist!

Of course, you can see this positively and admire the great expressiveness, charisma and individuality of these wines and accept that the difficulty of buying them comes with the territory. On the other hand, you may find it all too much bother, but that’s your decision. At JamesSuckling.com, our job is assessing each wine fairly and pointing out if something is difficult to obtain and/or expensive.

2023'S JOYRIDE

Now back to the 2023 growing season, which was a rollercoaster ride for producers. After a wet and mostly mild winter with only a couple of short cold snaps came a fine spring, and then into late May there was enough rain to ensure development of the vines’ new shoots. A good fruit set followed. Then came two months of warm, dry weather that looked like it might turn into another drought like those of 2015, 2018, 2020 and 2022.

"For a short period I was worried that some of the vines might die, then the rains came saved us,” Florian Lauer of the Peter Lauer winery in the Saar subregion of the Mosel told me. Take a look at the ratings for his 2023 wines and you can see what he means. They range right up to 100 for his spectacularly racy, perfect-scoring Peter Lauer Riesling Mosel Schonfels GG 2023.

The rains were particularly heavy at the end of July, with precipitation in the range of 25 to 30 millimeters each day for several days. With the rains came the danger of fungal disease, and so precisely timed spraying against mildew became crucial.

As the harvest approached, fungi of various kinds, including botrytis, started to spread. Botrytis is great for dessert wines, but only if it shrivels the grapes, and mostly that didn’t happen in 2023 because conditions weren’t dry enough. High-quality dessert wines are very rare in this vintage. Even Egon Muller of the Egon Muller-Schazhof winery, one of the world’s leading dessert wine specialists, has just one small bottling of Auslese Gold Cap (destined for a future auction), but no BA or TBA.

Given the fact that most of the German wine industry now focuses on dry wines, this development was very unhelpful. Most of Germany’s leading winemakers consider botrytis only negative for dry whites and always remove it by hand, which means time-consuming and expensive hand selection.

"It was the best and most beautiful harvest ever,” Martin Tesch of the Tesch winery in the Nahe told me, his voice heavy with irony. “No. it was warm and wet – 28 degrees Celsius during the day and 18 at night. 2006 was the only time I saw something like that before!” Tesch was joined in the cellar by his son, Johannes, for the first time and together they turned out the winery's best vintage in modern times. These wines are all great value for money.

That warm plus wet equals rot is beginners’ microbiology. I’ll spare you the advanced stuff, but it's all about an ugly form of biodiversity! 2006 was a classic example of this problem during harvest and a very difficult vintage for dry whites as a result. For German winemakers old enough to remember, 2006 was a vision of harvest hell they can’t forget.

"The challenge in 2023 was purity, not ripeness,” said Helmut Donnhoff of the Donnhoff winery in the Nahe.

His son, Cornelius, chimed in: “We needed 75 percent more pickers than in 2022. I’m so glad that we did that!”

So, it’s easy to understand how by the end of  the harvest the top producers were exhausted from endless selective harvesting and rightly skeptical about how the wines would turn out. A couple of months later, first tasting in their own cellars, then conferring with colleagues, came the revelation that the wines were way better than hoped for.

Just look at the stunning results that Donnhoff achieved. The Dönnhoff Riesling Nahe Dellchen GG 2023 and Dönnhoff Riesling Nahe Hermannshöhle GG 2023 are perfect wines, the former a great masterpiece of filigree, the latter more structured with a lot of restrained power. That’s a testament to the Donnhoff teams' dedication.

The explanation for this minor miracle? I think Eva Fricke, one of the leading producers in the Rheingau hit the nail on the head. “Regardless of how hot it was in 2023, there was always water in the soil,” she said. “The result is wines that are extremely complex, but also remarkably fresh, assuming the rot was all removed.”

That description exactly fits her extraordinary Eva Fricke Riesling Rheingau Krone Trocken 2023, another of the perfect dry rieslings of the vintage. Of course, all the dry wines of the 2023 vintage did not turn out this well, and we advise you to buy carefully. However, there were slews of dry whites in the range of 92 to 94 points. There’s a lot of good German wine out there!

The weather during the summer of 2022 – when the grapes for most of the reds I tasted were ripening – was very different. There was the most extreme drought of modern times, plus a great deal of heat and sunshine. This made some of the dry rieslings taste like austere, limey Australian rieslings, but it was way more positive for the reds. Let me explain why that was no surprise.

Drought puts the brakes on the photosynthesis of the vines, but it also encourages them to produce tannins and pump them into the skins of the grapes. This is crucial for great red wines, regardless of grape variety or region of origin. Shading the grapes for dry whites is crucial to preventing the resulting wines from tasting too tannic.

Some of the German critics have made bold claims about the 2022 vintage being the best ever for pinot noir reds. I think this is a bit one-sided, and it downplays the often excellent quality achieved by the leading producers in 2018, 2019 and 2020. However, I rated the Bernhard Huber Spätburgunder Baden Wildenstein GG 2022 a perfect 100, making it the first German red wine to achieve that score.

I think that a lot of the progress with red wines in Germany is about the leading producers learning how to make the tannins finer and more even throughout the palate. They are also letting the wines be more themselves, rather than trying to make them taste like red Burgundy. And climate change has helped all this enormously.

Finally, it’s worth noting the seemingly sudden explosion in the number of exciting sekts, or German sparkling wines. The sekt revolution could have happened a lot earlier if it weren’t for the fact that very cheap sparkling wines, largely made from imported Italian and Spanish base wines, formerly dominated the German market. It’s no wonder that German consumers who wanted a quality sparkling wine preferred Champagne before sekts made their splash on the scene.

I think that the Winter Sekt Rheinhessen Pure Brut Nature 10/18 says a great deal about what changed. Although this is a Champagne-method sparkling wine, it’s a cuvee entirely composed of reserve wines from the vintages 2008 to 2015. Germany’s first perfect sparkling wine is incredibly complex with a super mineral acidity and a kaleidoscopic finish.

It’s impossible to imagine a more radical break with the thin, tart sparkling wines of the past that were propped up with sweetness but still had an aggressive mousse.

Scroll down for the other game-changing German sparkling wines from producers like Aldinger in Wurttemberg, Bergdolt in the Pfalz and Keller in Rheinhessen.

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor

Note: The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated in 2024 by the tasters at JamesSuckling.com. You can sort the wines by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.