What We're Drinking: Malterdinger Weiss Bernhard Huber, 2020

As a buyer I am often asked for my hidden gems. Those wines, hiding in plain sight, that offer more than they have any right to. Bang for buck, value for money, QPR – call it what you will, these are the wines we buyers love to drink and surprise people with. But revealing them can be a bittersweet delight; as favourites become fashionable, we tend to be last on the list to get an allocation!

I could have chosen any number of wines for this; our new Mercurey Bourgignons from Domaine de la Monette; the baby auction wine Zellertal from Battenfeld Spanier; Thibaud Boudignon’s Anjou Blanc; or Desire Lines Winds of Change Syrah. I could go on. But, forced to choose just one I’ve been enjoying a lot of late, I offer you a Chardonnay from Germany’s finest Pinot Noir producer: the young Julian Huber’s Malterdinger Weiss from the brilliant 2020 vintage.

Singing with gunflint, struck match and crushed sesame notes this is firmly in the Coche Dury style-camp, with intense, sizzling and fully ripe fruit on the palate. A soupcon of Weissburgunder adds a lip-smacking touch of stone fruit, rounding it out beautifully.

Since 2019 this has been produced entirely from declassified Grosses Gewachs vineyards and as a result recent vintages have overdelivered in a big way. It is a delight, and my offering to your summer’s drinking.

As we’ve come to expect from Huber’s whites, lightly smoky reductive notes frame zesty lime, stone fruit and lemongrass on the nose. Electric and ripe, with beautifully integrated oak and crisp fruit, Julian Huber has found a formula for taut Burgundy-inspired white that is neither too lean nor overly reliant on reduction. A great balancing act and offering an immense amount of value for anyone with a taste for the wines produced by Boisson-Vadot, Roulot, Ente et al... A blend of 70% Chardonnay and 30% Grand Cru Weissburgunder.

Bernhard Huber, Malterdinger, Weiss 2020 at £34.66 per bottle UK including taxes.

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Described by World of Fine Wine as "one of the most important wine producers in Germany of the past 20 years" Bernard Huber's small, family owned estate sits to the east of the famous Kaiserstuhl in the Baden village of Malterdingen. Famed for his world class Pinot Noir, it was a great loss to Germany’s winemaking fraternity when Bernard very sadly passed away in June 2014. Often described as the German Godfather of Pinot Noir, Bernard used to ascribe the fact his wines are often mistaken for Burgundy to the cool often wet Malterdingen weather and its limestone soils, very similar to those found in the Cote d'Or. Records show that Cistercian Monks brought Pinot Noir to Malterdingen almost 700 years ago, planting the Wildenstein parcel in the Bienenberg vineyard. As today's Burgundian Grand Cru sites prove, when it comes to Pinot Noir, the Monks had an eye for terroir.

Today the estate is run by Bernard’s son Julian Huber, with the same winemaking team that was there in Bernard’s time. The more vintages the young Julian Huber gets under the belt, the more it becomes obvious what a gifted young winemaker he is. He appears blessed with a talent similarly prodigious to his late father, alongside a restless desire to fine tune an already winning philosophy. A frequent visitor to the Cote d’Or, Julian has a young winemaker’s thirst for how others are achieving the wines he admires – and this is translating into a few small but significant changes back in Malterdingen.

With the oldest vines on the estate dating back to the 1950s and Bernard's 25 years of tireless dedication to clonal and massal selection, the holdings now include three single vineyard Grosses Gewachs sites which produce a quality of grape that Pinot producers anywhere in the world could admire. To further enhance the vineyard definition, Julian likes to pick his grapes early in the window of ripeness, promoting their individual terroirs, but also combining "concentration, ripeness and complexity with elegance, freshness and purity in a way that is unrivalled in Germany".

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