From €10.95, £17.99
A constant refrain on our members' forum is the dramatically increased quality of red wines in Germany. As our German specialist Michael Schmidt, a resident of the Ahr valley, where red wine is a speciality, remarked somewhat testily in this recent thread, 'Very few people abroad know that almost 40% of German wine production is now red, and to realise that our producers make some world-class Pinot Noir you have to be a subscriber to the Purple pages'.
It is true that the Germans themselves are so keen on their newfound fully ripe reds that they represent a very small proportion of the wine exported from Germany, but that proportion is slowly creeping up, and Germany's most popular grape variety by far is Pinot Noir, more often called Spätburgunder in Germany.
See, for example, the Matthias Gaul, Palataia Pinot Noir Pfalz of which Marks & Spencer have now sold two vintages very successfully. The 2009 should be on sale at their larger stores for just £8.49. See too the excellent range of red wines always available at The Winery in London W9, imported directly by owner David Motion, who is one of Britain's biggest fans of German wine (and is also currently finishing his very own album, having a serious career as a music producer to keep him afloat), as well as those imported by Iris Ellmann of The WineBarn, the other obvious UK source of German wine as the Germans drink it rather than as the Brits used to import it.
But this von Buhl wine, also from the southern Pfalz wine region, is considerably more complex than the M&S version, and comes from one of the most respected traditional producers in the heartland of the Pfalz. Light ruby, it has particularly pure aromas of the sweet, mushroomy aspects of Pinot Noir. Now that German winemakers have completely mastered oak and red wine (in the old days, there was some pretty heavy-handed barrel influence), I find good German Spätburgunder is usually reliably gentler and fruitier than run-of-the-mill red burgundy and this wine shows Pinot Noir at its most delicately succulent. It finishes with lovely freshness.
I would drink it within the next year or so and I would be careful to serve it with fairly low-key food. Roast chicken springs to mind. Or it could even be savoured without food.
In the UK it is definitely available at Hennings (for £17.99), according to wine-searcher.com, and also at Bottle Apostle, Harrods, Jascots and Woodwinters, according to von Buhl's importers. In Europe it is of course widely available in Germany and, especially, in the Netherlands, where, to judge from wine-searcher, it must surely be available in every wine store in the land.
