Wasenhaus

Christoph Wolber and Alexander Götze met in Burgundy while getting their enology education at the local school in Beaune. At the same time, they both worked full-time jobs between some of Burgundy’s top biodynamic estates: Alex has spent nearly a decade between Pierre Morey and De Montille, where he is currently the vineyard manager, and Christoph had some years at Leflaive, Bernhard van Berg, Domaine de la Vougeraie and Comte Armand. Shortly after they became roommates, they hatched a plan to return to Germany and start a new project in Baden. This wine region sits on the east side of the Rhine Graben, across from and within sight of the Alsatian wine region, all in a valley that separates Germany’s Black Forest from France’s Vosges mountains.

It is difficult to imagine in a blind tasting that their Pinot Noir wines are German — no surprise considering their extensive apprenticeships in the world’s most extraordinary Pinot Noir-producing region. Their top Pinot Noir, Bellen, would be difficult to place anywhere besides Burgundy, at least for anyone less experienced with Burgundy wines.

Their first vintage was 2016, and it was an incredible start. The style is as lifted and charming as it is profound. There are no tricks here, just a reverence for their fruit and solid know-how in the cellar and vineyards. Their wines are crafted with clear intention; there’s no way anyone could achieve their level of quality in the first go-round by accident.

They are soft on extraction with very few punch-downs during the fermentation, with only the occasional movement of the cap, primarily by hand, to ensure a healthy beginning. Sulfur is used judiciously (no more than 30-50 parts per million) and not applied until after malolactic conversion. Their theory on the timing of the first sulfur addition is that the tannins would be more smoothly integrated than with additions beforehand, especially when whole cluster fermentations are involved. (When it’s added during the vinification period — including primary and malolactic — the wine has more time to define itself clearly, while those that have earlier additions before fermentation potentially maintain harder tannins that could take much longer to evolve in the bottle, it leaves some of the best potential moments of the wine’s life subordinate to a potentially overbearing tannic structure). The wines are all aged in oak barrels, but it’s too early to say what their practice will be from one vintage to the next concerning the amount of new oak — they are still discovering what works.

Burgundian monks were the first to bring the grapevines to the area. Still, the vines have adapted to their climate and soil types, which make them quite different than Burgundy, despite how surprisingly similar the Wasenhaus wines are to some from the Côte d’Or. However, one challenge to grape selection in this highly industrialized area is that many ancient clones were replaced in the 1960s and 70s by easy-to-manage clonal selections that produce good yields and are more easily worked by machines. One of the tasks (and adventures) of Wasenhaus is to (re)discover vineyards within Baden with good clonal material and recoup a resemblance to the historic voice of Pinot Noir in Baden.