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GERMANY
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Riesling is often referred to as the “King of White Grapes” and certainly no other white grape is made in such an awe-inspiring array of styles from the bone dry to the lusciously sweet.
Excitingly, Riesling sales continue to out grow even our own optimistic forecasts, but with five out of our six growers acknowledged by Gault Millau as Winemaker of the Year, we are fortunate to be importing wines from growers at the very top of their game.
Vines have been grown in Germany since the Roman times and indeed up to and including the reign of Charlemagne (768–814) most of the vineyards were to the West of the River Rhine, an area which to this day remains the heartbeat of German wine production. There have been trying times throughout the centuries; a crash in land value in 1540 after decades of prosperous growth resulted in a run on wine prices. Less than a century later the Thirty Years War ravaged Germany and aside from the destruction of vineyards and smallholdings, it left towns and villages without sufficient man power to carry on with such livelihoods. 1712 saw the first selected ‘Cabinet’ wines which were produced at Kloster Eberbach in the Rheingau but the subsequent Napoleonic Wars promptly saw the whole of the West side of the Rhine ceded to France. Only after the Congress of Vienna do German wines begin their meteoric rise to become some of the most sought after wines in the world by the late 19th Century. However, it wasn’t to last, two World Wars and the 1971 Wine Laws all but destroyed the industry, certainly the latter ruined its image, but Riesling is on the rise again and we can but hope that the 21st Century will see another revival in this remarkable wine making country.
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