Introduction to 2022 and 2021 German Grosses Gewächs White Wine Vintages

Last week I spent four days in Germany tasting Grosses Gewächs (GG) wines, mostly from the 2022 and 2021 vintages in white, and from the 2021, 2020, and 2019 vintages in red. 

To generalize for the whites (I’ll get to the reds in a later post):

2022. This is one of the most disparate vintages I have experienced in the 35 years that I have been covering German wines. There was a summer of drought, hot in some places, not so hot in others. The dryness often interrupted the development of the vines. There was then rain that generally came before the harvest unlocking the suspended growth, but in some cases, the rain continued into the harvest, resulting in dilution. Consequently, there are some great GG’s in the vintage and also a number of disappointing ones that sometimes show a lack of structure, sometimes a lack of concentration. 

Full maturity was not always easy to achieve, and for dry wines, chaptalization was not uncommon; (For Prädikat wines — Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, etc. — chaptalization is not permitted. However, the difficulty in achieving high maturities means relatively few noble sweet wines in the vintage.)

Because of the heterogenous conditions, sometimes the same estate will have both great wine and disappointing wine. One possible reason is due to rain and harvest timing. A second possible reason is that the water-retention and drainage capacity of different soils and vineyards gave vines in some places access to needed water and in other places not. A third possible factor is that because older vines have the deep roots to reach water, they were better able to access ground water during the dry growing season than younger vines that do not have the deep root systems.

In sum, 2022 is not looking like a vintage to buy blindly. The silver lining is that complex vintages such as 2022 often are written off by many who purchase only in highly-praised vintages, thereby giving those willing to sort out the good from the bad buying opportunities for wines that can be difficult to obtain in other vintages.

2021. Increasingly, producers have been holding back GG’s until the second year after harvest,* so there were plenty of 2021s to taste along with the 2022s (and in some cases, the same wine side-by-side from both vintages). 2021 was already impressive for the wines I tasted last year, and this year with more wines to taste, the quality was confirmed: a classic, balanced vintage. In contrast to 2022, which is often low in malic acidity,  there is no shortage in 2021, giving structure and crispness to the wines.

* In fact, the Rheingau VDP chapter now has a rule that its members’ GG’s cannot be released until September 1 of the second year after harvest, although the wines can be tasted earlier.