The tasting team at James Suckling sampled nearly 1,600 bottles of German wine this year, and one thing was clear: the 2020 vintage has multiple personalities, but mostly in a good way. Here are the top bottles from an interesting year…
Read even a small selection of the tasting notes accompanying our Germany report this year and you might wonder what’s going on. The majority of the 2020 dry whites that dominated the tastings rated just a point or two lower than the 2019 vintage of the same wine. Nearly all have classic balance and are attractive for current drinking: another good vintage.
However, there’s also a significant group of truly stunning wines with extremely high scores that make 2020 look like a really great vintage, following hot on the heels of the stellar 2019. Of course, we recommend these wines very highly and many of them have excellent ageing potential, but even that’s not the whole story.
After three months of tasting and talking to winemakers, we must describe the 2020 vintage in Germany as slightly schizophrenic, with three sides to its personality. The last of these is the small group of wines that failed to impress and were sometimes a bit ugly.
How could this crazy situation come about? Back in the 1980s, when we started writing about wine, poor vintages had a distinct flavour profile. Whether in Bordeaux, Tuscany or Germany, the wines from poor vintages lacked ripeness, and were lean and edgy with green aromas. It wasn’t difficult to spot them.
That combination results from too little sunshine and warmth during the summer and autumn. In contrast, the wines from the best years were ripe and beautifully balanced, thanks to abundant sunshine and warmth. When tasting the young wines of a region, the big question for us was always how far did the new vintage there go in either of those two directions.
Global warming changed all that, creating a new situation in which even cool-climate Germany can now ripen all the grapes grown there just about every year. In 2020 the problem was certainly not a lack of ripeness, but the worst drought in half a century combined with plenty of warmth and sunshine.
In April, drying winds and almost 100 percent more sunshine hours than the historic average set the vineyards on that arid course. The drought continued until rain arrived on September 24, more than three months after the previous significant rainfall. That’s close to a Mediterranean weather pattern.
Cornelius Donnhoff of the Donnhoff estate in the Nahe, who produced two perfect 2020 rieslings – one dry Grosses Gewächs (GG) and one naturally sweet Spätlese – explained the key challenge of the new vintage perfectly. “As long as you threw away the grapes from drought-stressed vines, it was an excellent vintage,” he said. “We also had to throw some grapes away, which hurt because they looked really good. However, they had no aroma and tasted bitter.”
Drought-stressed fruit explains the ugly German 2020s, while the good 2020 German whites come from well-managed vineyards with much less drought stress. That led to generally low yields but also a lighter structure than in the 2019s. Their lower acidity levels – significantly below the 2019s – have a lot to do with the heat spike that occurred in mid-September when temperatures topped 35 degrees in many places. This combination gives the good 2020 German whites their appealing personality.
Sadly, it’s not possible to give a list of regions that were the winners for 2020, because quality varies more from vineyard site to vineyard site, even from one parcel to the next, than from region to region. Just how much water reserves a particular area had was the crucial concern: in 2020 it really was about location, location, location.
“We were very lucky that there was enough rainfall during the winter,” said Wilhelm Weil of Weingut Robert Weil in the Rheingau. “Here in Kiedrich we also have the advantage of the forest above the steep vineyards that acts as a water reservoir. That was really important in 2020.”
Wilhelm Weil made one of the standout ranges of 2020 and there are even a couple of wines that top the 2019 vintage. His stunning, nobly sweet riesling Auslese, Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese wines are unusual, because they’re largely made from shrivelled fruit without the noble rot normal for this category.
The Top 5 German Wine Bottles
JamesSuckling.com gave perfect 100-point scores this year to these five top wines.
DÖNNHOFF RIESLING NAHE HERMANNSHÖHLE GG 2020
The greatest wines are clear right from the very beginning, because not only is there a super abundance of perfect ripeness, but everything fits so beautifully that you’re instantly captivated.
DÖNNHOFF RIESLING NAHE NIEDERHÄUSER HERMANNSHÖHLE SPÄTLESE 2020
Hit me with a flower! This starts very delicately with an incredibly subtle nose of fresh and dried flowers. Then comes the enormously concentrated yet totally filigree palate, which dazzles the senses with its thousand nuances and almost endless, super-silky finish.
GÜNTHER STEINMETZ RIESLING MOSEL NEUMAGENER ROSENGARTCHEN VON DEN TERRASSEN 2019
Totally amazing, super-ripe peach and Asian-pear aromas, yet the overall impression is of weightlessness. The stony minerality is almost too much to take at first and you need time to sink deep down into it.
JOH. JOS. PRUM RIESLING MOSEL WEHLENER SONNENUHR AUSLESE GOLD CAP 2019
Welcome to one of the most beautiful faces of the Mosel. The essence of yellow fruit, from peach through mango to papaya. So concentrated, yet so vibrant and so pristine with such a mind-boggling number of nuances that your nervous system is pushed to the limit, in the nicest possible way.
JULIAN HAART RIESLING MOSEL OHLIGSBERG KABINETT (WHITE LABEL) 2020
Hang on to your hat and switch on your brain, because it’s really hard to fully grasp this incredibly wild and totally original Mosel riesling.
For more wine reports and ratings, you can visit JamesSuckling.com
The post The Good & The Great: The Best German Wines of the Year appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.