Justerini & Brooks invites you to a Germany 2019 Webinar 

Featuring Joh. Jos. Prüm, Fritz Haag, Schloss Lieser, Maximin Grünhaus, Willi Schaefer and Forstmeister Geltz Zilliken

Germany’s 2019 vintage is clearly rather special and has even been described as a potential “vintage of the century” by Michael Schmidt. From best-ever estate wines, to aristocratic Grosses Gewächs, and many a luscious-yet-lively sweetie, we’ve tasted some truly thrilling wines while putting our 2019 offer together. Stylistically it is a hard year to pigeonhole as overall the wines present a wonderfully complex and somewhat rare blend of intense minerality married to ripe acidity. As Frank Schönleber noted, the wines have “the flavours of a cool vintage allied to the structure of a warm vintage” - a decidedly delicious combination and one that is guaranteed to win many friends in the years to come.  Many growers likened the vintage to 2015, though with slightly less extract, less punch, and more classicism. It is in short, a vintage of wonderfully balanced, complex wines that showcases Riesling's finest attributes. You can read the full vintage report here.

Here Comes the Sonnenuhr

Here comes the sun (doo doo doo)
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right

If there was such a thing, then The Beatles’ 1969 single “Here Comes the Sun” is surely the soundtrack for vintage 2018 in Germany.

Germany’s 2018 vintage is one that will go down in the records books for several reasons. It is possibly the biggest, almost certainly the earliest, and very likely one of the driest on record – a vintage that saw almost uninterrupted sunshine from May until harvest started in mid- September.

Most regions had one or two refreshing rain events during the growing season, but otherwise it was sunny, warm, and overall, exceptionally dry. There was no frost, and almost nothing lost to hail – the most notable exceptions being two of Klaus-Peter Keller’s top sites Morstein and Abts E, both of which had their production trimmed by around one third by a severe hail storm on the 1st June.

Surprisingly good 2017s…a vintage to woo and charm, from intense Grosses Gewachs, to kaleidoscopic TBAs….

2017 was a vintage that threw up its fair share of challenges across Germany’s various winemaking regions– a summer like spring causing a super early start, frost, troubled flowering, hail for the unlucky, and early onset botrytis forcing a highly selective and early harvest.  Despite these conditions the ingenious Riesling grape, particularly in the hands of Germany’s greatest growers, by and large fared amazingly well. There are very many wines here that will not look out of place when viewed next to their sibling vintages of ’16 and ’15 – albeit in a markedly different style. And after all, isn’t that why we buy these wines year in and year out?