Grosslage

While not an exact analogy, think of Cotes du Rhone vs Cote Rotie, just as Guigal's Cotes du Rhone is a nice quaff but not as good as their basic, Brune et Blond, Cote Rotie, a JJ Prum or Maximum Grunhauser can make a decent Grosslage. I sort of recall Bernkastler wines being a step up from Moselblumchin and Liebraumilch which are QMP. I have a fat Huge Johnson Guide to German wines which lists all the grosslage and einsellager wines and I had Franz Reh wines for Maryland, I used it but German wines are like Burgundies in that the producer/importer is the key factor in a buying decision and not a particular site.

I hope this answer doesn't gross anyone out!!!

"Mike Tommasi" skrev i melding news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Ian was as always quite correct - but you have missed it a little bit :-) The Grosslage of Michelsberg straddles 7 village areas - namely Minheim, Piesport, Neumagen-Dhron, Trittenheim, Rivenich, Hetzerath and Sehlem. Rivenich and Hetzerath both are 3-4 miles away from the river and Sehlem off my map even does not have a recognized single vineyard, afaik, so any wine from that village is by default of Michelsberg. Now, would such a wine always be sold as 'Piesporter Michelsberg'? I don't see any regulation to that effect - so you could as well have a 'Trittenheimer Michelsberg' or a 'Rivenicher Michelsberg'! However, there is brand recognition, and so Piesport has become the standard village name. That's to the detriment of Piesport of course and a boon to the lesser growers of other villages. (IMHO, it would have been much better to forbid any village name with the Grosslage. So Michelsberg pure and simple might have been the best solution.)

Will a Grosslage wine be a poor one? Not necessarily - you may imagine a big and good producer blending his leftovers from several vineyards and selling it under the general name of a Grosslage. A top example: The Bernkasteler Badstube Riesling Eiswein 2003 from Markus Molitor at 91 points (would be 96 in WS :-) 35.80EUR for a half bottle, by the way.

hth Anders

Salut/Hi Anders,

le/on Wed, 02 Mar 2005 20:42:29 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

Mike said

Not always ;-)) But thanks. This time I cheated, not over the basic facts, but with individual names and the relationships between exactly where Bereichs begin and end.

Indeed he did.

Exactly.

Hey, are you sure? I thought that a wine from a Trittenheim vineyard marketed under the Michelsberg grosslage name, HAD to be called Trittenheimer Michelsberg. Am I wrong here?

Quite right. Though compared with the general run of the mill of Grosslagen that's comparatively hard to find.

I am aware of all that.. That's why I said "seems".

Before my last posting, I tried (but failed) to trace my source of communication, but I believe I once had an email from someone that had spoken to a Jadot representative who confirmed that the Beaune was indeed from 1er Cru vineyards

I have less evidence for the single vineyard 1er Crus.

I rather suspect that Jadot were simply selling the wine at the AC they thought the wine deserved whilst keeping some sort of straighforward audit route. They are a large enough company to want to protect their brand rather than make a fast buck shifting wine from underperforming vineyeards on the back of undesrved ACs

"Ian Hoare" skrev i melding news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Hi again Yes, I am 99% sure you are. In fact, I have never seen any other name than Piesport associated with the Michelsberg though it includes 6 other villages... There's also the common perception that far more wine is sold under the Piesport name than is produced in Piesport proper... The German Wine Laws are quite obscure and I haven't been able to find iron-clad proof yet... Anders

Alexis Lichine gave a then complete table of the German wine classification in his New Encyclopedia of Wine and Spirits, 3rd. ed. in Appendix B. There may have been some changes since this was published. At the first level we start with Anbaugebiet(region) of which there are

11, ie. Mosel-Saar-Ruwer. Within these regions we have several subregions named Bereich. At the next level, wihin a Bereich are found separate villages and the viineyards associated with them.These towns or communes can be caled Weinbauort, Gemeinde, or Gemarkung. For the vineyards, an individual plot is called an Einzellage. However all Einzellagen are grouped into sections of vineyards called Grosslagen.

As an example we can start with the Anbaugebiet Mosel-Saar-Ruwer. Under this we can find the Bereich Bernkastel. Under this we can find several Grosslagen. One Grosslage is Badstube. Under this there is only one Weinbauort(village) called Bernkastel-Kues. Within this there are 5 Einzellage(vineyards including Doctor and Graben. However the Bereich Berncastel has another Grosslage called Kurfurstlay. Under this are eleven Weinbauort(village) names, one of which is Bernkastel-Kues also, which has 6 Einzellage(vineyard) names such as Rosenberg and Schlossberg. Thus if you bought a Badstube Grosslage wine, you would have a mixture of wines from 5 of the very top Bernkastel vineyards. However if you bought a Grosslage Kurfurstlay wine, it could be associated with any of 11 villages, each having several vineyards. I choose one of the most extreme examples of the complexity of the German wine classification. The aim of all of this mess of classification in the Bernkastel area likely is to allow many less well known wines that may even be fairly far from Bernkastel to take advantage o the Bernkastel name in some way. Things are not nearly as complex in some of the areas of Germany that do not have world-famous wines.

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