Winemaker Notes
The single non-local vineyard, Hanspeter is super stoked by the site, which is a half-hour away on the lower hills of the Black Forest, on limestone layered with iron-rich clay, in a strikingly high elevation of almost 2,000 feet.
This wine is simply beautiful, grasses and flowers and filigree, and the mid-palate swells into lovely richness and length.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Ziereisen's Blauer Spätburgunder a.k.a. Pinot Noir 2019 Talrain offers a pure, fresh, elegant, intense and slightly flinty-scented bouquet of dark sour cherries, black berries, iron and dark meat, then some fine herbal notes later on. Medium-bodied and fresh yet intense and grippy on the youthful palate, this is rather lean and fresh but fleshy and silky-textured Pinot reveals a serious structure built by fine tannins, ripe acidity and stimulating saline finesse that gives a clear, crisp and nicely bitter finish. Not as generous as the 2018 or as impressive as the 2017, the 2019 shows more of the purity, elegance and freshness of the 2016.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
