It is no small matter to make wine in Germany. A grape needs about 1,300 hours of sunshine to reach full maturity and our eastern neighbors often only just arrive. Many vineyards are therefore located either in the south of the country or in sheltered locations such as river valleys.
Yields
Despite the limited amount of sun, the Germans still have one of the highest yields per hectare: an average of about eighty hectoliters, which is almost twice as much as the French. An advantage of that little sunshine is that the development of the grapes takes place very slowly, so that really everything is extracted from the ground.
Think of it a bit as a cold-soil vegetable that always has much more flavor than a greenhouse product. It is therefore possible to make excellent wines in Germany. Unfortunately, German wines have somewhat damaged their image here by a flood of highly uninteresting, cheap and often cowardly sweet wines that are sold at the grocer’s and others for ridiculous prices. You should therefore really look for the better wines. Independent, wine-loving sljters in particular sometimes have a surprisingly nice assortment and the same applies to some traditional wine buyers.
Sweet taste
A clear characteristic of German wines is the presence of sweetness. This is very deliberately pursued because the Germans themselves love it. The shops also have red imported wines from countries such as Yugoslavia, South Africa and Bulgaria, which have been supplied with some sugar especially for the German public. In good vintages, the sweetness level is achieved simply because the grapes contain so much sugar that there is still some left over even after fermentation.
That is the most natural way. On the basis of the sugar content in the grape, the wines can even be given a special designation. In less successful harvest years, people often turn to the Süssreserve, the sweet reserve. This is added to a completely fermented wine that is considered too dry or too sour. The sweet reserve consists of wine that has only briefly fermented so that it still has a lot of sugar and only a few percent alcohol. Its use is completely legal; trade in it is free. There are even specialist companies that do not make and supply anything else.
It is never necessary to state on the label whether Süssreserve has been used. The only condition is that the sweet reserve wine has the same quality as the wine with which it is mixed. One may have reservations about this course of action, but practice shows that a good cellar master can use this remedy without you tasting anything later. But it also happens that people have thrown a little at it, resulting in a rattling ?? wine.
Nice German wines ?? even those of very sugary grapes ?? are never just sweet like a sweet Spanish wine. They always have a counterbalance in the form of some acid plus the spiciness of the minerals and other substances from the soil. As a result, they do not get bored easily, they tire less and they still refresh.
Every year Germany produces between four and seven million hectoliters of wine, of which about eighty-five percent is white. The red wines are hardly worth mentioning because they are often consumed on the spot and do not mean much in terms of quality. In addition, they generally do not tolerate travel well. Practically all viticulture in Germany is concentrated around the Rhine and its tributaries. The wines from the Ahr, Baden, Hessische Bergstrasse, Mitteirhein, Nahe and Württemberg are hardly exported and are therefore only exceptionally in the shop.