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Video Transcript: German Wines 101

Written By: ClassicWines.com Team on Thursday, May 15, 2008

Brian Freedman: Welcome to the Classic Wines Minutes brought to you by ClassicWines.com; I am your host Brian Freedman. Join me as we explore the world of wine with the Sommelier Instructors here at the Wine School of Philadelphia.

Keith Wallace: I am here with Frank Ciparrone a Sommelier Instructor at the Wine School of Philadelphia and today we are talking about German wines.

Frank Ciparrone: Keith when people say to me German wine, and even friends of mine like aficionados.

Keith Wallace: Like yourself.

Frank Ciparrone: Thank you. We have an idea what French Wine about, here when people talk about Italian or Spanish wine there is a point of reference, with German Wine I know a lot of people just draw a blank and I think one of the reasons for that is the labeling, on the German Wine bottle there is just so much information, could you decipher some of this?

Keith Wallace: Yeah there is so much here. You can get into all this the producer and then there is the larger region like, just like there is anywhere else in the world but then you have the town and then you have the vineyard and then you even have the rightness level and whether it's dry or not and shall we continue?

Frank Ciparrone: Do you have to?

Keith Wallace: That's probably enough for today.

Frank Ciparrone: Yeah I think so that's an indication of how much information we are talking about and well it does give you an idea about how much information is there and I think a decipher it does become a problem at some point. The one good thing that is on a bottle of German wine for example this one, they tell you what the grape is, in this case this is reisling, but even with that there are other indications on here about different styles and I think that also is something that people have difficulty with, could you explain more of that please?

Keith Wallace: This is actually a great, great tip because if all you know is the grape and then this other term behind it, it tells you when it was picked, you have a general idea of what style of wine this is, for instance a reisling cabernet is going to be -- when they are first harvested it's -- so it's going to be/have less sugar-- so it's going to be fairly dry and great acidity, then you have a spatlese and a spatlese is harvested just a little bit later and so the sugar content is a little higher, so you can have either higher alcohol wine or sweeter wine and then auslese and those are picked much later and these are going to have much, much sugar in the grapes. So you end up with this wine that's either very high in alcohol or sweet and these are three table ones, there are other ones trockenbeerenausese and eiswein, but we don't need to get into those.

Frank Ciparrone: Those are more dessert style wines.

Keith Wallace: Those are dessert wines.

Frank Ciparrone: Well we have a reisling in the glass here Keith what is this?

Keith Wallace: Well this is a spatlese and this is a reisling spatlese but it is dry it's trocken, so you have -- it is wonderful, it's that interplay of mineral and acidity; these are really, really beautiful wines.

Frank Ciparrone: There is a lot going in one of this glass that's for sure, that's for sure.

Keith Wallace: Oh! Thank you so much.

Frank Ciparrone: Well thank you Keith for helping explain the mysteries of German Wines, and wine Labels to us.

Keith Wallace: Prost! Well, folks, join us again as we continue our journey in the wine world.

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