Weingut Dautel Wurttemberg Spatburgunder 2018
-
Robert
Parker
Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
Fruit is picked in the early morning, quite cool and mostly destemmed. For single vineyard wines, up to 30% whole cluster is used, but in the estate it is almost all destemmed. Christian wants only whole berries here (any crushed fruit is sorted out) and there is some carbonic fermentation in the open tank – a 3 week maceration and fermentation. The wine sees only remontage for the first part of fermentation; it is only after the ferment is really running that Christian employs pigage. The wine is pressed and racked into old 2500L and used barrique and is kept on the lees without lees stirring for 11 months before racking and bottling.
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Spätburgunder trocken displays a dark cherry color and opens with a pure and refreshing, yet still reductive bouquet of blackcurrant, cherries, cassis, underwood, toast and iodine. Bottled with 13% alcohol this is a very charming, light-footed and refreshing Pinot with a silky-texture, stimulating acidity and phenolic grip. The wine is fine and intense, always fresh and tight on the finish, representing a great vintage for Pinot Noir—the finish is pure, long and intensely fruity yet without sweetness or any masking oaky, toasty notes. This is simply an impressive Pinot in the entry-level price class. Tasted from AP 31 19 in June 2020.
Ernst Dautel, Christian’s father, was the first generation in his family to attend winemaking school in Geisenheim in the 1970s. When he returned home he decided to stop working with the coop, though his father was one of the founding members of the coop in Meimsheim. Ernst didn’t want to “throw his fruit in with all the rest and get some bad quality wine out of it.” Ernst is an iconoclast and one of the first producers in the Württemberg to estate bottle wines. His wife Hannalore was from Bönnigheim, where the winery is located now and; they were married in the late 1970s. Their eldest son, Christian, was exposed to wine at a very young age, recounting picnics in the vineyards and family vacations that always included visits to great estates.
Ernst became well known, in part for challenging the status quo in the region but also for making excellent wines, though they were not always regionally accepted. He joined the VDP in 1999 and the estate remains one of the very best in Württemberg, now under the guidance of Christian, who returned home in 2010.
Christian is a thoughtful winemaker repeating the refrain we always hear from quality minded growers – “the wines are made in the vineyards”. Like other top winemakers from his generationm taking over successful wineries from their parents, he has a huge amount of respect for what his father accomplished and sees no need to tear down the work that has been done by making abrupt changes.
Christian’s goal is to continue to bring out the specific character of each terroirs without losing the inherent flavor of the grape variety planted to each vineyard. Wines are not made by formula, but by taking in to account the feeling for each site and variety. These are singular wines, unlike anything we’ve come across in Germany.
Germany is famous for spellbinding white wines, but a quiet revolution in red has been developing in recent decades. Pinot Noir leads the charge as the most widely planted red variety. Of the 13 German wine regions, five have notable plantings of Pinot Noir, which is locally called Spatburgunder.
Pinot Noir is the primary grape in the Ahr, a tiny region that is one of Germany’s northernmost. The rocky slopes store summer heat, which, together with light reflected off the Ahr Rive, aid in ripening. These German Pinot Noirs can be surprisingly rich and juicy. Baden is another warmer German region where Pinot Noir is number one in plantings. Many fine red examples come from here, as well as rosé versions, locally called Weissherbst. The Pfalz, protected by the Haardt Mountains, is sunny and dry enough to produce ripe Pinot Noir as well. The final two, Rheingau and Rheinhessen, benefit from Burgundian techniques like careful vineyard management and ageing in barrique.
While differences do exist from region to region, German Pinot Noirs typically show off a personality that is light, spicy and vivid. Flavors of cranberry, cherry, baking spice, along with a persistent stony minerality are common. These wines present a greater similarity to Alsatian and Burgundian Pinot Noir than to California examples.