GERMAN WINE HISTORY

The light at the end of the Dark Ages has a name - and it is Charlemagne. 

-Huge Johnson, The Story of Wine 

Around 16 BC, Trier became a massive Roman metropolis. The Romans first planted vineyards in Germany during the 1st Century AD, shortly after establishing military garrisons along the Rhine and Mosel rivers. Austere but safer than water, Roman soldiers were entitled to a daily ration of wine, more efficiently supplied by grapes grown on the frontier. Massive stone wine presses found in Piesport and Erden date to the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. From 276-282 AD, Roman Emperor Probus lifted a ban on planting new vineyards in the provinces. The Roman poet Ausonius wrote in his poem Mosella around 370 AD about "sloping hillsides green with the vines of Bacchus." Winegrowing in Ancient Rome's Germania was of great importance. 

After Rome's fall in 476 AD, Europe experienced frequent conflict and despair for the next 500 years, while the influence of Germanic kingdoms, monasticism, and the Catholic Church grew. The thirst for German wine in Medieval Britain was greater than that for French wine, and vineyards along the Rhine rapidly increased. Monasteries kept planting vines during these so-called Dark Ages, and great Benedictine abbeys emerged as custodians of winegrowing and winemaking know-how. 

The King of the Franks and Europe's father, Charlemagne, spent much of his reign at war, conducting over 50 military campaigns and, among other conquests, conquering the Saxons in modern-day Germany after a brutal 32-year war in 804 AD. He also founded schools, preserved Latin manuscripts, and standardized weights, measures, and writing. There are numerous legends surrounding Charlemagne and wine, symbolized by his construction of a palace on the Rhine at Ingelheim. 

Folklore suggests that, from Ingelheim, Charlemagne observed the snow melting first on the hills of Johannisberg and the Rüdesheimer Berg, and ordered vines to be planted there (the same story persists in Burgundy about the Corton-Charlemagne hill, and something about a stained beard). He also enforced strict laws of wine hygiene and commerce. The varied iterations of wine taverns in German-speaking Europe, which permit direct sales of wine from producer to consumer, are direct descendants of Charlemagne's decree allowing winegrowers to hang a branch signifying wine for sale.

By the early tenth century, Germany produced the most and the best wine in northern Europe. The Church granted special status to Germany's privileged wine villages. These Winzerdorf, walled and often situated along rivers, enjoyed an unusual degree of independence. Bernkastel on the Mosel and Riquewihr in Alsace are two such examples of Winzerdorf in the Rhineland. By 1226, the entire Rheingau was cleared and planted with vines and wholly ruled by the Church. Rheinish wine became a great luxury in England, and the boom in winegrowing continued into the next few centuries, coming to a head with deteriorating weather and the Thirty Years' War.

The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) was fought primarily in Central Europe, within the territories of the Holy Roman Empire (mostly modern-day Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic). While nearly every significant European power was involved—including France, Sweden, Spain, and Denmark—the vast majority of the actual combat, destruction, and loss of life occurred on German soil. The war decimated vineyards, press-houses, cellars, and the wine trade's infrastructure.

The winegrower's priority after such a destructive period is to have a crop. Quantity, not quality, drove winegrowing in Germany after the Thirty Years' War, so it's unlikely that ancient Riesling, that wine grape par excellence but demanding of site and soil, was the first choice for replantation. Riesling likely originated in the Upper Rhine, possibly specifically in the Rheingau. An ancient crossing of Gouais Blanc (German: Weißer Heunisch) with a close but extinct relative of Savagnin (German: Traminer), or Gouais Blanc x (Savagnin x Vitis Sylvestris, a native wild grape of the Rhine Valley). Its exact genetic origins remain unknown. 

Winegrowers likely included Riesling in a "mix set" of varieties that comprised the field blends typical of the time. However, history has given it a precise birthday: March 13, 1435, the date recorded in a cellar log in Rüsselsheim. An administrator for Count John IV of Katzenelnbogen purchased six Riesling vines. The document records a payment of 22 gold coins for cuttings of "Rießlingen." 

With its origins in the Rhine, Riesling's qualities were well known in Germany by the mid-17th century. However, Riesling's dominance began to take hold in 1716, when the Prince-Abbot Constantin bought what remained of the old Benedictine monastery of Johannisberg in the Rheingau. The Prince-Abbot rebuilt the Schloss and replanted its south-facing slope exclusively with Riesling. In the 1760s, the Cistercian monks at Kloster Eberbach planted their Steinberg vineyard with Riesling and enclosed it with a wall like its Burgundian cousin, Clos de Vougeot. Meanwhile, the Prince-Bishops of  Würzburg focused on Silvaner, a variety better suited to the lime-rich soil of Franconia.  

With a recovering economy and population growth in the 18th century, vines found their way back to the steep slopes of the Rhine and Mosel Valleys, and producers would allow their wines more time in Germany's cold cellars to develop. "The use of sulphur, the 'Dutch match,' was routine by this period to prevent the wines from fermenting completely dry," wrote Hugh Johnson in The Story of Wine. Whether it was cold cellars or the use of sulfur, whatever style was in fashion at this time, sweeter or drier, is of some debate. Nevertheless, the weather had improved, and with it, the spread of Riesling, and its ripening period extended. The legends of late-harvested Riesling were soon to come.

The wine cognoscenti and their aristocratic clients in Europe would already have been familiar with a few celebrated botrytis-produced wines in the mid-18th century. Botrytis-affected Ausbruch and Tokaj from the Kingdom of Hungary, and even an occasional Rheingau Riesling, would have been produced from botrytis. Famously, a 1753 Steinberg was made entirely from Edelfaule, the German term for botrytis. Extended harvests and botrytis necessitated selections in the vineyards and cellars. At Schloss Johannisberg and Kloster Eberbach in the Rheingau, a wine produced by a special selection might have been destined for the Cabinet, a cellar section reserved for exceptional wines. 

In 1775, Schloss Johannisberg produced a special wine from late-harvest grapes, which comes with a historically tidy story. Permission to begin harvest at Schloss Johannisberg required approval by its owner, the Abbot of Fulda, a seven-day ride away. Manager Herr J.M. Engert sent a courier to obtain the Abbot's permission to commence harvesting, but, for unknown reasons, the courier was delayed. By the time he returned, all the grapes were rotten. When tasted in the spring, Herr Engert declared, "This 1775 wine is so extraordinary that from the eight tasters no word was heard other than—I have never had such a wine in my mouth before!" The concept of Spätlese (late-harvested) wine had been born. 

The Congress of Vienna in 1815 was an important diplomatic summit held in Vienna, Austria, to "reset" the map of Europe and create a long-term peace plan following the chaotic upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution. Its goals were to restore the "legitimate" royal families to their thrones (such as the Bourbons in France) and to contain France with strong "buffer states" (such as a newly enlarged Netherlands and a powerful Prussia) to prevent future French aggression. Prussia was granted the Mosel as a buffer zone, and the Mosel entered into a period of great prosperity.  

With Spätlese's "discovery," Schloss Johannisberg set a trajectory for 19th-century Rheinish wine with further selections like Auslese, Beerenauslese, and Gold- or Edelbeerenauslese (precursors to the modern Trockenbeerenauslese). Soon, with special Prussian status, Moselwein too began its period of ascent, with increased plantings, population growth, and a series of outstanding vintages in the 1820s. Prussia's rise coincided with the Zollverein, a Customs Union uniting the German states, and excluding Austria, leaving Prussia as the undisputed economic leader of the German lands. `

The 19th century saw the Zollverein and the railroad bring better Rhineland wines to major German cities. Schloss Johannisberg and Kloster Eberbach in the Rheingau were late-harvesting systematically, and Schloss Johannisberg employed a grading system with different-colored wax seals. The Palatinate (Germany's Pfalz) had been freed and awakened by the French Revolution, and the Zollverein gave them an opportunity, which was solidified by a famous land-tax survey conducted by the Bavarian state in 1828. Alsace, part of France, was excluded from the Zollverein, allowing Baden to assert itself through further plantings. In Franken, secularization took hold, and vineyards shrank, while by the 1840s, the Mosel began to thrive. 

Light and acidic Mosel wines were the perfect material for the rapidly growing Sekt industry, and with improved transportation, they began to find markets outside the Mosel valley in the 1840s. Another help to the Mosel wine industry was an invention by the French chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal in 1801. Chaptalization became a common practice of adding sugar to unripe grapes during fermentation to increase their alcoholic strength. During the Napoleonic Wars, Chaptal's innovation helped the French wine industry survive difficult vintages. Its arrival came surprisingly late to the cold climate of the Mosel, popularized by German chemist Ludwig Gall in the 1840s, who added water alongside sugar in a process known as Gallization. Gallization saved many estates in the Mosel region during a decade of poor weather, but would become the catalyst for Germany's first wine law and centuries of debate.

In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, Germany became a unified country in 1871. The new government founded the Geisenheim Wine School in Rheingau in 1872, and 'model' State domaines in Trier and the Nahe. Just two decades later, the 'Gesetz, betreffend den Verkehr mit Wein' (Law concerning the winetrade), enacted on May 24, 1892, became the first significant piece of national legislation passed to regulate wine in the newly unified German Empire. The 1892 law was a "food safety" response to the rise of artificial wine. The law's fundamental goal was to define what could legally be called "wine" and to establish that wine must be a product of the fermentation of fresh grapes or grape juice. It strictly banned the addition of artificial colors, salicylic acid, and saccharin. Fine, but what of this controversial topic of Gallization?

The 1892 law permitted adding sugar to grape must to compensate for the naturally low sugar levels in grapes grown in Germany's cool climate. The technique was called Verbesserung (improvement). Because this was considered a customary cellar treatment, there was no requirement to disclose it on the label. At the time, there was no legal term like Naturrein (naturally pure) or Naturwein (natural wine) to indicate that a wine was unsugared. The 1892 law sought to catch "Gallized" wines that, by doing so, created a larger volume of drinkable liquid. This issue of Chaptalization or Gallization would be a sticking point, leading right up to the 1971 wine law and beyond. 

At the end of the 19th century, Riesling would have been mostly dry, unless it was late-harvested, the government was making quality-minded investments, and a law that at least attempted to distinguish between artificial and natural wines was in place. Despite the shortcomings of the 1892 law, things were looking up for German wine when phylloxera hit northern Germany in 1874. Some steep slate sites in the Mosel went unscathed, but other vine maladies like peronospora and powdery mildew caused further headaches for late 19th-century German winegrowers. 

At the end of the 19th century, wine schools and grape-breeding stations began to emerge in response to these diseases, and cooperatives formed to blunt harvest fluctuations and raise overall quality. In 1910, the most quality-minded among German wine producers formed the Verband Deutscher Naturweinversteigerer (Association of German Natural Wine Auctioneers). The VDNV would be the predecessor to today's VDP, though with a different set of criteria than the VDP classification in place now. Its main tenet was Naturwein, which meant specifically: wine made without Chaptalization. 

1918 brought the end of World War I and the end of German wine's "golden era," when its seat at the top tables of Europe, garnering some of the highest prices paid for any wine of this era, came to a screeching halt. German wine lost its most important markets, and the world sank into a devastating economic crisis. Things did not improve much for the winegrower between the wars, and World War II brought more economic pain, not least of which was the loss of many Jewish wine merchants. 

By 1950, only 49,000 hectares of vineyard remained in Germany compared to the estimated 300,000-400,000 hectares under vine at the end of the Middle Ages and the 103,000 hectares of vineyard that exist today. Quantity, not quality, ruled the day, and viticulturists developed new high-yielding varieties, while vineyards became more mechanized. 

Sterile cold filtration, a technology pioneered by the German company Seitz (now Seitz-Filter-Werke) in Bad Kreuznach around 1920, enabled winemakers to halt fermentation and retain natural sugar in the wine by filtering the yeast away before bottling. The process ensured a biologically stable, clear, and sweet wine that producers could ship around the world without fear of refermentation. Wine producers could now precisely control the style, but also mask poor quality with sugar. German wine's era of "cheap and sweet" had arrived. 

For reasons we'll explore in the chapter German Wine Law Explained, a new, sweeping wine law came into effect in July 1971, which would radically alter German wine for the next half-century. Among its many follies was a quality system based on sugar and a wholesale abandonment of the concept of terroir. No longer did the winegrower need to be from a famous winemaking village or own vines in a renowned site. In fact, those thousands of historically named vineyards would be enlarged and reorganized into larger conglomerations known as Grosslagen, borrowing the names from famous ones. 

To reach the apex of quality meant to harvest ripe grapes adorned with a Prädikat like Kabinett or Spätlese, terms usurped from Germany's past and given new, legal meaning in this new era of German wine. As a result, the VDNV rebranded as the Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter (the VDP) and retooled its mission to focus on quality and ultimately the quality of its vineyards. The development of their origin-based classification system, leading up to the current iteration introduced in 2012, is covered in the chapter "Germany's VDP." 

VDP or not, most German producers now organize their production and market their wines on a Romanic, rather than Germanic, system, i.e., terroir, and most German wines are dry. However, the Prädikat categories persist, and in the northerly winegrowing areas such as the Mosel, light, low-alcohol wines with zappy acidity balanced by residual sugar are a wine style that no other wine-producing country can produce. Happily, it's all part of what makes German wine unique and gives us the diversity and range we enjoy today.