The Third Country Nobody Names

Germany is the third-largest grower of pinot noir on earth, behind France and the United States.

That sentence surprises almost everybody, including people who drink a lot of wine. Something like eleven per cent of the German vineyard is planted to it, under the name Spätburgunder, and it has been there for centuries rather than decades.

The name means late Burgundian, and the late refers to how the grape ripens rather than to when it is picked or to any sweetness in the glass. It is pinot noir, the same variety, nothing else.

The Ahr is the region that makes the point best. It is a narrow, steep slate valley a long way north of any latitude that ought to ripen a red grape at all, and the majority of its plantings are pinot noir. On paper it should not work. In practice the slope angle and the heat retention of the rock compensate for a climate that is, on the numbers, hopeless. Baden, much further south, has the warmth the Ahr does not and produces the country's richest examples.

So Germany had the ground, the grape, the slopes and the centuries.

And until about the 1990s it made ordinary wine.

Pale, often faintly sweet, thin, unmemorable. Not bad exactly, but not something anybody outside the country sought out, and not something anybody would have described as world class.

Then, inside roughly twenty years, it became genuinely serious. The best German pinot noir now competes with good Burgundy on its own terms and is bought by people who could buy either.

What changed?

Yields, cut hard. Better plant material. And a generation of German growers who went to Burgundy, worked a harvest or three, and came home with a different idea of what the grape was for.

Nothing about the ground changed at all. The Ahr's slate is the same slate. The slopes face the same way. The latitude did not move.

This is why the chapter is here rather than as a footnote somewhere, and it is worth being blunt about what it costs the argument this subject has been building.

Burgundy's founding claim is that the ground is the wine. Germany is a controlled test of that claim conducted over a century, with the ground held constant and the people changed, and the wine was transformed. If the hillside decided everything, that could not have happened.

It does not follow that the ground is irrelevant. The Ahr's specific slate and specific slope angle are the reason anything ripens there. But it does follow that the ground is not sufficient, and any account of terroir that cannot accommodate a region being mediocre for centuries on excellent land is not an account of what actually happens.

Keep it for the last book. It is one of the two or three pieces of evidence that prevents the honest verdict from being a simple one.