Germany Annual Report: After Flying Blind, a Smooth Landing

2022 was the warmest year ever recorded in most of Germany’s wine-producing regions, and the summer of 2022 was both hot and extremely dry. Although there was some good rain at the end of June, almost no rain fell between July 1 and Sept. 1. By early September, vineyard soils were dryer than at any time in living memory.

August was marked by Mediterranean-type heat, with the weather station in Zeltingen, in the Mosel region, recording an average temperature for the month that was fully 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) above the historical average. On top of that, there were almost 80 percent more hours of sunshine than normal. It looked like a rerun of 2018 or 2003.

As Markus Hees of the Hees winery in the Nahe said to me: “We never experienced such a severe drought before. Making wine in 2022 was like flying blind to an unknown destination!” Read the notes below and you will see that in spite of this, many of his wines arrived in great shape.

“Like everyone else, we feared a vintage of rich and weighty wines like the 2018s,” said Sofia Thanisch of the Wwe. Dr. H. Thanisch (Erben Thanisch) winery in the village of Bernkastel-Kuesin in the Mosel.

“It is a wonder how filigree and elegant the wines have turned out,” she said. “We had 100 millimeters of rain in September and another 100 millimeters in October. In retrospect this shaped the wines.”

Harvest rain doesn’t sound positive, and it always leads to some rot. How quickly rot spreads depends very much on the temperature. When about 25 millimeters of rain fell on Sept. 14, it pushed the development of botrytis, but it also pulled temperatures down significantly, putting the brakes on the spread of botrytis.

Due to repeated showers and some heavier rain at the beginning of October, the affected grapes rarely shriveled, making Auslese and higher-level dessert wines a rarity in 2022. Joh. Jos. Prum and Markus Molitor in the Mosel were the only producers to show me a wide range of these.

However, the first light rains at the beginning of September were actually positive, because they refreshed the vines and got photosynthesis going again. Under drought conditions, riesling batons down the hatches and goes into survival mode, and this seems to be why it did better than many other grape varieties in 2022.

Those are the basic facts, but what I encountered when I tasted the wines was heterogeneous and sometimes confusing. I described the results of the similarly hot and dry 2020 growing season (with much less fall rain) as “schizophrenic.” The same can be said of 2022, perhaps even more so.

For example, riesling wines from the Mosel are famous for their high acidity, but in 2022 they had moderate acidity and this enabled many producers to make wonderfully harmonious dry wines that mostly already drink very well.

In contrast, acidities were generally high not far to the south in the Nahe Valley. In fact, some Nahe rieslings from 2022 remind me of steely and citrusy Australian wines from this grape. However, the landscape and conditions in these two regions are broadly similar.

In spite of 40 years experience I can’t explain why the vines reacted so differently in these two regions. What I can explain is the fact that alcohol levels in the dry rieslings are moderate to low. This was the result of the interruption of photosynthesis during the summer drought. This means that there are a bunch of excellent dry wines with just 10 to 11 percent alcohol. I can’t remember a vintage in which I noted that so often as 2022.

There were some wines with unusually prominent tannins, a logical consequence of the summer heat and drought. The vine produces tannins and puts them in the grape skins in reaction to drought stress. They act as a protective shield for the pips (in terms of evolutionary logic, the long-term future of the vine).

In cheap wines this can be coarsely dry, or the tannins have been fined out leaving a hollow shell. We only taste wines that will be exported or are likely to be exported, and therefore I didn’t write that many notes for wines like this.

This situation makes it impossible to make the kind of simple call of “top vintage” or “bad vintage” in the same way James Suckling and I did when we started out as wine critics back in the 1980s. Climate change has altered some aspects of our job. The last German vintage that was consistently excellent was 2019, but to find another comparable one you have to look back a long way.

However, take a look at photographs from the 2022 harvest period taken on the sunny days by top producers like Selbach-Oster in the Mosel and it looks like a great vintage. There’s a reason for this. Top producers in Germany, like elsewhere on Planet Wine. do precision viticulture with lots of fine-tuning by hand during the weeks before the harvest. That means removing rotten fruit before fungi can spread, plus exposing the fruit to sunlight and wind so the grapes dry quickly after each shower.

There were plenty of them, too. As Urban Kaufmann of the Kaufmann winery in the Rheingau said to me: “Typical for 2022 was the weather report predicted that the next day would be dry, but then it rained. Thankfully we had all the pinot noir grapes in the winery before the rain really started!”

Pinot noir is way more rot-sensitive than riesling because of its tight clusters, but it is also earlier ripening, so much of the crop had already been brought in before Sept. 14. From the first 2022 pinots I tasted (mostly cask samples that don’t appear in the notes below) it looks like an excellent vintage, just as it does in Burgundy.

But how good are the best drier-style whites from the 2022 vintage taste, and are they worth buying? The simple answer is that it’s a crapshoot, but the most dedicated winemakers made some extraordinary wines. Read the notes below to find out the details, but watch for the words “limited production” and “very limited production.” A bunch of the highest-rated wines fall into these categories.

“The 2022 Schubertslay is one of the best dry whites I ever made!” Klaus Peter Keller of the Keller winery in Rheinhessen told me, and the Keller Riesling Mosel Schubertslay GG 2022 is one of the most amazing dry rieslings I ever tasted. And his richer and more Keller Riesling Rheinhessen Abts E GG 2022 is another perfect expression of the vintage.

Of course, due to Keller’s reputation they are going to be hard to find and expensive. The same applies to the amazing top dry wines and riesling Kabinetts from Julian Haart and Günther Steinmetz in the Mosel. However, if you are not hung up on particular producer names, then Germany still offers so much excellent value for money. With the help of the notes below it should be no problem to hunt down some bargains.

– 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.