Better than ever

We have already discussed the general conditions of the 2024 vintage in our Riesling report. The year was anything but easy, even if the stresses were distributed very differently. In contrast to 2023, however, the white Pinot varieties sometimes had advantages over the Riesling, for example in parts of the Nahe and Rheinhessen and especially in the Southern Palatinate.

How the red wines will develop remains to be seen. The initial results are not yet very meaningful. Unfortunately, the yields at least rarely gave cause for joy.

Many red wines from Pinot varieties from the 2023 vintage are surprisingly good. After the great previous year and in view of the weather conditions, one could hardly have expected this at first, but we like some 2023 wines with their precision and freshness even better than their 2022 counterparts. The conditions were even more difficult in some places for the white Pinot varieties wines, but fortunately you can only rarely taste this in the wines. At their peak, 2024 and 2023 appear to be neck and neck here.

Everything has been said about the quality of the 2022 red wines; this was undoubtedly an exceptional year for Pinot Noir. However, we are still receiving white wines from the vintage, as the white Pinot varieties wines are also willingly given longer barrel ageing. When tasting them, we once again realised that Pinot varieties often cope better with very dry years than Riesling.

In 2021, on the other hand, the red wines in particular sometimes struggled with ripeness. However, we have been able to taste some outstanding wines in recent months, especially among the late-submitted Pinot Noirs, which once again put the vintage in a different light.

We tasted 1,450 wines from Pinot varieties of all types from Germany in the past tasting season, plus around 280 from our neighbouring European countries. For the cuvées, we have also included those that only contain a proportion of Pinot varieties. We present the best wines here, as well as the particularly inexpensive still wines up to 15 euros and sparkling wines up to 20 euros. Links to all the wines tasted can be found at the end of each list.