August 24-26 I attended the VDP’s preview of Grosses Gewächs ('“GG”) wines to be released on September 1. Those unfamiliar with the terms VDP and GG should first scroll down to the last two paragraphs where I give an explanation.
I had time to taste only Riesling (and not even some all areas) and Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir).
For the most part, Rieslings were from the 2024 vintage, although some wines from 2023 and earlier were shown. (Indeed, in the Rheingau, there were more 2023s than 2024s.)
2024 was a challenging vintage. The following will be a general summary that does not apply to each estate as there are so many micro-climates in Germany, but it will apply to the great majority of wines:
There was frost in April that severely affected the vines, especially in Saar, Ruwer, and Nahe. So much so that von Schubert in the Ruwer lost all its crop (a minuscule crop was made from grapes of the second budding). As a result of this, the VDP allowed some producers to buy from other VDP estates, although to my knowledge, none of the GG wines includes purchased grapes. Some estates also suffered hail in the spring. Over the summer, rain was frequent, requiring extra work in the vineyards to combat fungus.
A result of all this is (a) there was diverse ripening, even within the same estate as some plots suffered from the freezes and others not, and (b) overall, the crop is small. There was early picking in some parts, and harvesting that continued to the end of October in others.
The commentaries that I offer on the wines in following posts should be restricted to the wines I tasted and not generalized, as I was only tasting GG wines, and not other wines of the vintage. Additionally, many of the wines had been bottled only a week or two prior to the tasting, meaning that the wines were still suffering from bottle shock, and so they may yet show better in the future. I have plenty of experience tasting wines shortly after bottling and making adjustments, but unfortunately, we were not given the bottling dates of the wines, so we did not know which wines to judge with the understanding of recent bottling.
Overall, the 2024s I tasted were very good to excellent, but there were somewhat fewer great wines than in other recent vintages. The wines on the whole showed good freshness and appear to be for near- and medium-term drinking, not necessarily for the long haul (which in the case of GG, can be decades).
Now, for some definitions. VDP stands of Verband der Deutscher Prädikatsträger. It is an organization that dates to 1910 and consists of approximately 200 excellent German wine estates. With the increasing quality across all of Germany, there are now many excellent estates that for various reasons are not members of the VDP, but you can have high confidence that any wine from a VDP estate will be of, at the least, very good quality and often excellent or great quality. VDP member wines are marked by a stylized eagle symbol that can be found on the capsule.
Grosses Gewächs literally translated is “great growth”, and Germany producers speaking English often use the term “grand cru” for GG. These are wines that come from a VDP producer’s best vineyards that have been certified by the VDP as meeting GG standards. For Riesling, it is a term that is used exclusively for dry wines.