The Other Great Pinot Noir: Tasting Back to the Golden Age of Germany’s Spatburgunder

Surrounded by marble columns and beneath a frescoed dome in a baroque palace, I sat with a row of glasses of old pinot noir red wines in front of me and couldn’t believe how vibrant the rich and concentrated 1953 vintage tasted.

Super-fine and almost perfectly balanced, it was a breathtaking masterpiece from one of the great pinot noir vineyards of the world. However, it wasn’t a Grand Cru red burgundy or even a Premier Cru.

The wine in my glass was from the Hollenberg vineyard site of the village of Assmannshausen in the Rheingau, and was made by the Kloster Eberbach winery, often referred to as the Rheingau State Domaine. The reason almost no one has ever heard of this vineyard is that the long string of vintages in which exciting dry reds were made from it ended decades ago.

From the early 1960s onward, one stylistic change followed another as wine fashions changed, and the clear profile these wines once had was lost along with their reputation. By the time James Suckling and I first encountered young vintages back in the late 1980s, they were almost forgotten outside of Germany.

I was able to “excavate” that past at a series of tastings late last month at Schloss Biebrich, the state-owned palace on the bank of the Rhine River, about a 45 minute-drive upstream from Assmannshausen. The tastings were jointly staged by Kloster Eberbach’s director, Dieter Greiner, and Ralf Frenzel, publisher and editor of FINE, a German-language wine magazine.

Wine history is often just a bunch of myths and legends, so before we started tasting, Daniel Deckers, a journalist with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper (Germany’s equivalent of The New York Times), held a concise lecture that set the Hollenberg record straight.

Yes, Kaiser Wilhelm II, also known as “Kaiser Bill,” was a fan of the Hollenberg wines and he drank an average of one bottle per day (perhaps more after he abdicated in 1918). Prior to this, the wines enjoyed a good reputation from the time that wine tourism on the Rhine, via steamer, began in the middle of the 19^th century and the railway line to Assmannshausen was opened in 1862.

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However, the golden age of these spatburgunder (the German synonym for pinot noir) reds only began in 1925 when construction in Assmannshausen of what Deckers called “one of the most modern wineries for reds in Europe, and possibly the world” was completed. It was a gravity-fed winery decades before this expression was even coined. In the same year, Ewald Schug was appointed winemaker and the fireworks really began. (Ewald was the father of Walter Schug, who later founded Schug Carneros Estate in Sonoma, California)

And although some vintages had faded, the 1958, 1953, 1947, 1926 and 1921 were all still truly extraordinary wines that can stand next to the best produced in Burgundy during this period. In addition, wines from the following vintages all rated 90 points or higher: 1964, 1963, 1962, 1961 1959, 1957, 1955, 1954, 1952, 1951,1945, 1937, 1935, 1931, 1930, 1929, 1925 and 1882.

Yes, you read right, the oldest wine in the tasting was 140 years old. It was immediately recognizable as a pinot noir red in spite of just a shimmer of red in the amber color. The candied orange character and silkiness on the palate were truly extraordinary for this age.

It is clearly the oldest red wine I have ever tasted that was still good to drink. For example, my experience with old red Bordeaux that still have drinking appeal reaches back to the Chateau Haut Brion 1911.

All the wines at Schloss Biebrich were tasted blind from numbered stemware, with some surprising results. For example, many wines from non-famous vintages, like 1963, 1958 and 1935, showed extremely well.

Another standout was the Hollenberg Spatburgunder GG 2019. GG stands for Grosses Gewachs, the unofficial German version of Grand Cru that has been promoted by the VDP association of leading German wine producers for the last 20 years. It is clearly the best pinot noir red that Kloster Eberbach has made from the Hollenberg in several decades, and it’s also one of the first of the estate’s wines made by winemaker Kathrin Puff, who previously worked at Monsoon Valley winery in Hua Hin, Thailand.

Crazy as that leap may appear, it seems to have given her a crystal-clear outsider’s perspective on these wines. And that has lead Kloster Eberbach back to its red wine roots.

I asked Puff about her favorite wines in the tasting and she zeroed in on the 1929 and 1925. “They weren’t made from overripe grapes, nor were they over-extracted during fermentation, then they didn’t see too much oak during aging,” she said.

That’s a very good description of the way she makes the current Hollenberg spatburgunder reds. “We want to focus on the vineyard site and the grape variety and to ignore trends that go in other directions,” she said.

The soil in the steeply sloping, south-facing Hollenberg is phyllite, often erroneously referred to as phyllite slate. In fact, phyllite results from the further metamorphosis of slate. It glistens due to the mica it contains.

Kloster Eberbach owns 17 hectares, or 42 acres, in the best, central section of the Hollenberg. For comparison, that’s slightly more than double the size of the entire Richebourg Grand Cru in Vosne-Romanee in Burgundy.

The combination of these sizable holdings and the way the best Hollenberg wines showed at Schloss Biebrich suggests that the potential for these spatburgunder reds is enormous. And it also looks as if this long story, with its great ups and downs, may have a happy ending.

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor