Jeniffer Crafts, AWS, NoLoCo Chapter: Annette Schiller is our Northern Virginia expert on wines from Germany, France, and Austria, as well as the Owner of Ombiasy Public Relations & Wine Tours. For the April meeting, she will present on the theme of the New German wine laws, which took effect in January of 2021. She will guide us through tasting wines representing the four primary geographic levels (Area, Region, Village, and Vineyard). If you’ve been stumped when reading German wine labels and tasting German wines, prepare to become extremely knowledgeable.
April 16, 2023, Northern Loudon County Chapter of the American Wine Society
Did you ever complain about the difficulty in understanding the label of a bottle of German wine?
Those days are finally over, since on November 26, 2020, the German parliament passed a new German wine law, which took effect January 27, 2021. The most important point of the new wine law is that a new hierarchy to determine the quality of the wine was introduced. The emphasis shifted from the sugar level of grapes at point of harvest as quality measure to the wine’s geographic origin and how narrowly it is defined. The bottom line is: the narrower the origin, the higher the quality. This concept follows the “terroir” principle, well-known from the classification in Burgundy and elsewhere. We will explore the quality levels by tasting several wines moving up in the quality pyramid as well as tasting the same wine within the same quality levels in the dry and sweet versions.
Annette gave the same presentation, with different wines, at the German Wine Society (Washington DC Chapter) recently.
See here, including her power point presentation:
The New German Wine Law of 2021 - Tasting at the German Wine Society (Washington DC Chapter), presented by Annette Schiller
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The New German Wine Law of 2021 - Tasting at the German Wine Society (Washington DC Chapter), presented by Annette Schiller