Jochen Beurer Trollinger 2023

There is something very special about this damn wine and if it were easy to translate into words, well, I’d just write that one line and be done with it. Though this is definitely a red wine, Jochen himself always says, “…this isn’t red wine or white wine, it’s Trollinger.” Which is to say this is a singular wine: bright and brambly, with vivid crunchy red fruits, a myriad of dried spices and a fine, bouyant minerality. Beurer’s wines always have a sort of energy to them. It’s like they don’t follow the normal rules of physics; these damn wines levitate. This is especially true of this wine.

Although in Swabia the most commonly planted grape is in fact not Riesling but Trollinger,Beurer’s version remains one of the few Trollinger-only bottlings. Which is to say, most of the Trollinger in Swabia is just blended away into nondescript red wines. Beurer’s Trollinger, however, comes from a serious plot: about 1.2 hectares of Trollinger vines up to and beyond 50 years old. This wine deserves to be bottled on it’s own.

If you know this grape at all, you probably know it by it’s other name Schiava and associate it with northern Italy. But of course all these countries, these man-made constructs, came longafter the vines had found their happy places. And Trollinger is very happy here. Germany is in fact a country that excels at red wines that taste not unlike the most delicate of northern Italy; we could call this area of Germany “Alto Swabia.” Germany is, in general, a cool-climate country, and so the reds here are vivid, dancing, transparent, aromatic and acid-driven.