TRINKMagazine: New German Wine Law....

Interesting article in TRINK Magazine by StevenSidore on the new 2021 German Wine Law:
https://trinkmag.com/articles/new-german-wine-law-winners-and-losers

It refutes the notion that the old 1971 German law tied the Qualitats level (Kab/Spatlese/Auslese/..)
to quality. I guess I just never made that direct a correlation between Qualitatswein level and "quality".
That Auslese was automatically of higher quality wine than Kabinett. To me, it merely measured the level
of ripeness at which the grapes were harvested, nothing more. True, it is so that you find more higher-quality wines in
the Auslese level than the Kabinett level. But I never automatically conferred a higher quality on Auslese.

I like the guy's writing style ("turd in the punch bowl").

But it's still all too complicated for my simple mind. When it comes to German wine, I simply rely on the most simple
rule of thumb: If DavidBuecker says it's good, then, by dammies, it's good!!

Tom

[David M. Bueker]

Any law is going to have openings for more financially motivated (that’s politespeak for greedy) producers to slink through and grab coin by deceiving less informed consumers. That said I still don’t like the updates, but I can largely agree that they (mostly) come from a good place.

Ultimately I think this will just move the goalposts, and have little impact on German wine sales.

The German wine business seems to be adept at finding new ways of confusing the consumer.

I think that I largely understood the prädikat system together with the 1971 law and the traps laid by its emphasis on sugar and by the similar structure of einzellage (single vineyard) and grosslage (village generics) names, etc.

Then along came VDP with its GG, EL, etc, structure modelled on the Burgundian appellation system. I'm just about beginning to understand this system and attain a certain level of trust for their designations.

Now comes along a new law which seems to propose the generalisation of the VDP system with vineyard designations in the hands of "democratic" and consensual committees. This seems like a recipe for the dilution of standards. At best it means that the consumer will have to learn a lot of new tricks and traps. That's fine for wine geeks like us but what about the rest of the wine drinking public?

[David M. Bueker]

Indeed there will be those that find ways to manipulate this system in order to sell mediocre wine to unsuspecting consumers.