A drier style of hock
WHILE semi-sweet German blended wines have enjoyed phenomenal success in the UK, the market for the finest estate- bottled hocks and moselles has remained static. The best sweet wines of Auslese standard and above have their rather tradi- tional, and perhaps declining, following among Oxbridge dons and the like, but the medium to drier wines from Spatlese down to Q.b.A. seem to fall into a vacuum. Determined specialist merchants have had some success selling them as summer aper- itif wines (for which they are ideally suited, when there is a summer), but this is hard work and brings little tangible reward. It is not because they are too expensive that these wines are hard to sell: despite the labour involved in making wine from the steep vineyards of the Rhine and Moselle, where most machines are useless, it is still possible to buy fine single vineyard Spatlese from a good vintage for little more than a fiver. The older wines from excel- lent vintages like '71, '75 and '76 have until recently been the outstanding bargains of the auction rooms: the prices have risen, as the wines have become scarce, but the levels are still far from astronomical.
These wines, in fact, have been sinking into obscurity, as far as the majority of wine drinkers are concerned, and it would surprise many lovers of French dry whites to learn that from about 1860 to 1939 the top German wines matched the most ex- pensive clarets and burgundies in price and prestige. At a Christie's auction in May 1877, for instance, an 1857 Steinberg sold for the same price, 90s. a dozen, as 1865 Lafite, while an 1862 Schloss Johannisberg sold for 130s. On the restaurant lists of the 1920s and 1930s, the best hocks and mosel- les conceded little or nothing to the top growths of Bordeaux. What on earth happened? The answer, given to me on a recent visit to the Rheingau by Bernhard Breuer, one of the co-founders of the new Rheingau Charta association (of which more later), is quite simple: after the second world war, new wine-making technology enabled growers to produce more wines in a sweeter style, suitable primarily for drinking on their own, whereas the hocks and moselles of the past were intended to accompany food and were predominantly dry. The sweet Auslesen that were made were naturally sweet, produced from grapes so ripe that they stopped fermenting with a consider- able amount of sugar still unconverted.
A trend towards drier wines has been in evidence in Germany itself for the past 15 years, but this has been resisted by the UK market, and I must say that I have sym- pathised with this resistance, having found most of the Trocken and Halbtrocken wines that I have tasted too brutally dry and austere to be appealing. When Bern- hard Breuer of Scholl & Hillebrand, Dr Hans Ambrosi of the Staatsweingut in Eltville, Dr Becker of the Giesenheim Weinbauschule and Graf Matuschka- Greiffenklau of Schloss Vollrads set up the Association of Chartered Estates (Charta for short) in order to promote the drier style from the Rheingau region, they de- cided against extreme dryness. Charta wines, which must be 100 per cent riesling and estate-produced, contain between 9 and 18 grammes per litre of residual sugar. This puts them mostly in the Halbtrocken category, but the words Trocken and Halb- trocken do not appear on the labels of Charta bottles, which are distinctively embossed with the Charta symbol of a Roman double arch.
More important, perhaps, is the stipula- tion that Charta wines must contain at least 7.5 grammes per litre of acidity. Acidity is the life-blood of German white wines, indispensable in imparting character, ba- lance and longevity. The Charta founders believe that far too many German wines are de-acidified for early consumption. The drier style wines may seem excessively hard when tasted at a year or two old, but that is at least partly because they are by no means ready to drink. These, Breuer claims, are the clarets of the white wine world.
Four days wining and dining in the Rheingau have certainly convinced me that the drier hocks are an excellent accompani- ment to a wide range of foods, from wild boar to shellfish. For those attached to the sweeter style wines, it may be reassuring to know that many people in Charta agree that Kabinetts and Spatlesen need a con- siderable degree of sweetness.
Ausonius
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