Yesterday The New York Times printed a beautiful piece regarding the new wave of German Chardonnay by Eric Asimov. The article was largely (though not totally) based on a dinner organized by the collector (and friend) Robert Dentice. The event included over twenty different Chardonnays from no fewer than nine different importers; it was as extensive a tasting of Germany Chardonnay as I’d imagine has ever been held on U.S. soils.
What a thrill it was to have five of the seven “star” growers mentioned in the article all from the vom Boden family (Jonas Dostert, Lukas Hammelmann, Keller, Moritz Kissinger, and Carsten Saalwächter). As a childish aside, it was a thrill to see five of my photos, all taken from my travels in Germany, used in the paper.
I showed my son, thinking he’d be impressed. He shrugged, poured his milk unenthusiastically, and walked out of the kitchen. So it goes.
If you are interested in finding the wines of any of the vom Boden growers mentioned in the Times article, please just email us at orders@vomboden.com. We can likely help you find them.
And if you are really tasting the wines, and ignoring labels, this is a journey worth taking. Many people have noted that the climate in Germany today is something like it was in Burgundy 20-30+ years ago. What this means is rather evident when you begin tasting the wines.
Yet, Chardonnay in Germany is more than the “Burgundy-ification” of yet another region; it is truly more than the easy sell for Germany. The most profound proof of this fact is that fifteen years ago, at the height of Chardonnay’s popularity, hardly any serious German growers engaged with the grape.
Today, however, very serious growers are finding that not only does the grape say something unique in Germany, but the reality of the harvest has changed a lot in this new era of climate change and Chardonnay is a part of this adaptation. We will discuss this below in our first section: “the reality of Chardonnay in Germany: the how and why.”
Then, in the second section of the email, just a bit further down, please find our writings on the young wunderkind Moritz Kissinger. In a lovely random exchange with Kissinger’s friend Tomoko Kuriyama from Chanterêves, she wrote, “I love the soul and aesthetics of his whites… there’s a warmth and elegance, and on top of all that there’s an effortlessly defined style.”
I penned this snazzy piece of writing that I think holds true as well: “[Kissinger’s wines] feel like cousins of iconic French regions and wines – Champagne, Jura, Burgundy – authentically filtered through the soil of the Rheinhessen, by a young winemaker who has grown up on this soil.”
Yes, this is a crazy-long essay. Turn off your cell phone, do not look at the news, take a deep-dive into this curious narrative.
While Pinot Noir has a long history in Germany (maybe 1,000 years, give or take?), Chardonnay is a very new addition to the vinicultural tradition of Germany. Most of the growers I’ve spoken to say the first plantings they ever heard about were in the 1980s. Felix Keller, in Asimov’s Times piece, notes a cool piece of history which I had never heard. Felix remarks that his grandfather had planted Chardonnay in 1988, but they just didn’t have much success. “Back then, it didn’t ripen every year,” is how Felix described it. The fact they waited until 2018, exactly 30 years later, to try again indicates that it might have been a rather more traumatic experience?
I think it’s safe to say that the 1990s is the beginning of “quality” Chardonnay in Germany and it began in the warmer regions in southern Germany: Baden. (One should note the “warmer” south in Germany would still be considered the “cold” north in France. The city of Reims in Champagne is at 49.15 degrees latitude; Baden-Baden in Germany is at 48.76.) Bernard Huber in Baden was one of the first to make more complex, balanced Chardonnays that spoke of soil (we had two at the German Chardonnay dinner in fact, both were lovely).
Yet, as evidenced by Felix’s comment that they really didn’t try again with Chardonnay until 2018, Chardonnay – despite a simply ridiculous global commercial success – had little to no voice in the German viticultural landscape. I can’t believe this has anything other to do with the fact that, outside of the few warmest terroirs, it was just too cold.
As Robert has said to me, what’s so provocative about Chardonnay in Germany is how quickly it’s arrived. While the quality of Pinot Noir (Spätburgunder) has been a multi-decade effort with obvious stops and starts, the quality of German Chardonnay has developed so rapidly and naturally. As if it were all simply a matter of the right time?
It did not work 30 years ago. It works, profoundly, now. As simple as that?
It’s much more complex than this. This is a long narrative that obviously involves climate change: a rather huge, very cold chunk of limestone (called the Rheinhessen) which now finds itself with a profound climate for this grape. Yet at the same time, one cannot underestimate the cultural exchanges, the very authentic connections between growers from so many countries, sharing information, tasting, and talking. Just reference the Chanterêves quote above.
Yet what’s also important to keep in mind with the Chardonnay story (and, frankly, the sparkling wine story, the Spätburgunder story, etc.) is the other new reality of climate change: compressed windows for the harvest.
I’ve written about this fact ad nauseum (see my section titled “die Lügen” in the 2023 vom Boden vintage report) but normally only in regards to Riesling. I had not thought of Chardonnay as a chess piece in this new game. As Klaus Peter Keller noted in the Times piece, the climate is not just getting warmer, it’s getting more extreme: frosts, drought, deluges of rain, hailstorms. “Therefore, we must spread the risk a bit more than we would 30 or 40 years ago.”
The Riesling harvest in Germany fifty years ago was largely a village-wide affair that could extend over weeks and even months. The cold months of October and November historically functioned as something of a natural refrigerator: if you picked on a Monday or waited until Friday, not a whole lot changed. Yet today, the harvest comes earlier and it’s much warmer, meaning the ripeness in the grapes continues to rise quickly while the acidity decreases quickly. This fact condenses the harvest window, dramatically. During the harvest today, days matter. And what lasted months in the past, can now be over in a matter of two or three weeks.
To some extent, especially for the top-top growers, it makes a lot of sense to incorporate grapes with different harvest windows. Some of the sparkling wine renaissance that’s happening in Germany today is the result of the realization that this early harvest is beneficial, not only for the wines being made by these first picks, but also for the grapes being left on the vine. From the sparkling wine harvest one can transition into the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir harvest, and then finish with the Riesling harvest.
The new harvest, with this environmental dynamism, is also why the easy narrative of “the vintage” has begun to truly collapse. The story can be radically different at two different estates from the same village. One picked on Monday and the other picked on Friday; you can taste the difference.
This new harvest is also why the smaller growers, able to quickly react and tend to their vineyards in a matter of hours and days, have a profound advantage. And you can taste it.
Please understand Kissinger’s wines are very hard wines to contextualize; there is a lot going on here.
We’ll do our best to be both complete and concise, to try and explain the hype, the magic and the beauty of Moritz Kissinger’s wines.
While Moritz is a fourth-generation winemaker, he is only the second generation in his family to bottle his own wines; his father began before him in 1986. The family estate is about 14 hectares total, though Moritz is only farming around seven hectares at the moment for his own production.
Moritz Kissinger, as a person, has a warmth and an openness that, like his wines, feels both incredibly refreshing and also somehow familiar – and not in a chummy or cheesy way. He seems to be a sort of ever-smiling human combinator. I have rarely visited him (or have seen him) without a small entourage of friends from various nooks and crannies of the wine world. When I visit him we taste all of Moritz’s wines… and then normally a parade of wines from around the world – unicorns and trophies, oddballs and curiosities, everything and the kitchen sink. It’s like a vinous version of speed-scrolling through Instagram: sensory data points unfurling across the palate in rapid succession (though this is an analog, human experience, and so one feels none of the guilt after such a tasting).
Suffice it to say Mortiz has an incredible energy, a curiosity, a passion and sociability that maybe puts him at the center (or very close to it) of something that really feels like a movement of young growers in the Rheinhessen.
Since the post-war period, the Rheinhessen has had something of a schizophrenic history. This, the largest winemaking region in Germany at some 30,000 hectares, was the fertile and fecund ground zero for much of the commercial plonk that devastated the reputation of German wine in the 1970s and 80s.
The Kissinger estate is located in Uelversheim, a village located in the eastern part of central Rheinhessen. Mostly, you would probably define this place by where it is not.
It is not a part of the famed red slope or “Roter Hang,” the steep vineyards hugging the Rhein in the Rheinhessen’s northeast (Kissinger’s village is slightly south and slightly west of here). It is not a part of Keller’s “Hügelland” and the roll-call of famous vineyards around Westhofen (Kissinger’s village is north and slightly east of here – see map to the right). The point being, I suppose, that aside from these two famous sub-regions of the Rheinhessen (which together account for only a few hundred hectares), a fair question to would be: What the hell else is going on in the other 28,000-something hectares of the Rheinhessen?
And truth be told, if you’d have asked me that question five years ago I would have looked at you with translucent, fish-like eyes staring into the blue while trying to think of some respectable-sounding answer… because I had none.
Today, maybe I have an inkling; the story is only beginning.
Moritz Kissinger (and Carsten Saalwächter up in the north of the Rheinhessen) represent for me the two most-realized growers of this “new Rheinhessen.” I’ve been tasting with both of them for years at this point, impressed by their freshman vintages, by the first wines they put into bottle… and now, only a few years later, slack-jawed and oftentimes honestly dumbfounded by how ****ing good these wines are.
I suppose what makes these wines so revelatory is the style, which, when you approach them through the lens of many Rheinhessen wines (most of which are grandiose yet crystalline dry Rieslings), they feel shocking, discombobulating, disorienting. Kissinger’s wines are more relaxed, wider. They use their textural qualities in an unapologetic way; they have an approachable honesty that isn’t rustic exactly, but it is maybe jarring – the degree of clarity, the forthrightness.
And then, with the second sip you approach the wines more as Chardonnay or Pinot Blanc (whether still or sparkling), or as Riesling, grown on limestone without thinking about the cultural baggage of the Rheinhessen, or of Germany at large, and they make perfect ****ing sense.
These wines are absolutely what they should be.
I’ve had this thought on multiple occasions tasting Mortiz’s wines: “How did no one make wines like this before?”
Dry white wines, and some reds – Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc), Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir – that feel simultaneously so original and absolutely obvious and perfect, as if this where the Rheinhessen that has always been around… or should have been. They feel like cousins of iconic French regions and wines – Champagne, Jura, Burgundy – authentically filtered through the soil of the Rheinhessen, by a young winemaker who has grown up on this soil.
Right now there are little islands of ambitious (and often very young) growers popping up all over the expansive ocean of the Rheinhessen. They are beginning to realize what is to some extent a pretty basic and self-evident fact: Places that were once slightly too cold to get optimal ripeness for the more serious grapes are now in something of a golden zone.
It is such a beautiful, absolutely magical moment in German wine, a renaissance and Kissinger is in the very heart of it all.
While Moritz produces stunning single-variety bottlings, his “entry-level” wines punch well above their weight class. I find this fact – that the entry wines are very, very serious – again and again with younger growers who both haven’t yet captured all the nuances and details of their parcels (and therefore put “Grand Cru” material in basic bottlings) and who also want to make a strong first impression.
The name of Kissinger’s basic bottlings – “0 Ohms” – refers to an “ohm,” a measure of resistance, implying that these wines offer zero resistance to drinking freely and happily. This is all very cute and very true. Yet the white (a blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Blanc) and the red (100% Pinot Noir) are both complex, deep and detailed. They can carry this expansive quality because they have, no surprise, a plush and buoyant acidity that pushes the wines across the palate with… yes, no resistance.
Both of Kissinger’s “0 Ohm” wines have arrived and are available. His single-variety bottlings (Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Weisserburgunder, and Riesling) will arrive in the fall.
Kissinger’s other passion – and as mentioned, a narrative that traces nearly the same lines as Chardonnay in Germany – is sparkling wine. Kissinger worked with Cedric Mousse in Champagne, yet beyond this, he loves Champagne. And you can taste this; Moritz is one of the most exciting young growers working with sparkling wines, along with of course Felix Keller, Lena Singer-Fischer, Griesel, and others.
Kissinger’s “Winzersekt” (grower’s sparkling wine) No. 3 is a blend of roughly one-third Chardonnay, one-third Pinot Noir, and one-third Pinot Blanc. Around 80% of the cuvée comes from the 2022 vintage; the rest is from a solera which contains mostly the 2020 and 2021 vintage. This is a nervy and focused sparkling, linear with green citrus and a prominent, saline minerality. With time in the glass (or time in the cellar), a dusty, floral herbal component emerges, candied ginger, brioche; the wine is saturating and expansive and a damn revelation for the price. Do not miss.
For any questions regarding Kissinger’s wines or any of the growers mentioned in The New York Times article, please email orders@vomboden.com.