For the prior three days, I have been tasting Grosses Gewächs wines at the annual preview put on by the VDP, the group composed of many of the most elite wine estates in Germany; the wines will be released to the public on September 1. This was the 21st annual tasting of the wines, and I am privileged to have attended 19 of them (because of COVID restrictions, I could not enter Germany in 2020 and there was another tasting that I missed in the early 2000s).
A large number of the white wines I tasted were from the 2021 vintage, although there were others from the 2020 vintage and even as far back as 2017. 2020 is an excellent vintage, but the real story is the great quality of the 2021 vintage, especially in the Pfalz and its extension into the southern part of the Rheinhessen known as the Wonnegau.
People writing about wine often use the word “stunning” as a descriptor; its use is almost always a rhetorical exaggeration, and hence the word has become badly devalued. Yet in the case of 2021, it really does describe the quality of many of the wines. Time after time, I found myself instinctively raising my hand to my forehead as I tasted and evaluated these wines. In all my decades of tasting wines, I cannot recall that ever happening before.
The great wines are marked by electric acidity, density from high extracts, and overall completeness that recall the 1990 vintage, for me the greatest overall vintage of recent decades — except that German wine back then was still dominated by wines with residual sugar and almost no one was making top quality dry wines in 1990. But if today’s producers had access to the fruit from 1990, 2021 is how I imagine the wines would come out.
I shall be posting my notes on the wines tasted in the coming weeks, so check back regularly.
I shall also be travelling to Austria in a few weeks to taste there what people are saying is a vintage of very great wines and will be reporting back on those wines, too.