Personalities

Joel Payne: Precise calculation
«Vinnaya Karta» №11 (81) December 2006

“Gault Millau” is one of a few publications that has carefully followed the development of the German winemaking.

Since 1992 it has been publishing an annual wine guide which became the largest and most authoritative source of information for country’s wines. Joel Payne has been the author since the first edition of the book.

– There wasn’t that much written about German wines. There was an occasional article in a magazine or in a newspaper but, as in many other countries, wine got little attention. It was a beverage, people drank it either with a meal or, as is more often the case in Germany, on its own after a meal — sitting by the fireside playing a game of cards. In the past this was the most popular way of wine consumption in Germany.

There had occasionally been a single guide that was done, but not each year. Ours was the first that was to be repeated year for year. We were also the first to present wines from the given vintage. For example, 2007 edition features white wines of 2005 and red wines of 2004. Others classified the producers, but they didn’t actually go into a given vintage.

– Yes. It was something that in this form had not been done and even today there is not much else on the market. It’s not like in France or Italy where there are three-four major guides. In Germany several people tried to publish a guide but none of them had enough of a following to be able to continue.

Today there is an alternative guide, however its owner Gerhard Eichelmann mad his money somewhere else and wine is hobby. The circulation is about two thousand copies. Eichelmann publishes it himself, the project is not designed as commercial and has little impact on the market.

– Firstly, Gault Millau has long published a restaurant guide. Of the four major restaurant guides, Michelin and Gault Millau have the largest following. The fact that a guide had a name that consumer interested in food and wine knew, certainly helped.

Wine had been popular before as a subject, but since World War II the Germans have tended to be not very proud of themselves. I can say it honestly as a non-German. They work a lot, they do the best they can, but they don’t talk a great deal about being German. I remember when I first moved and worked in one of the five best restaurants in Germany there were no German wines on the list. This was not something unusual. In the southern part of the country where most of our wine is made, restaurants would certainly offer German wines, but the further north you went the more likely it was that better restaurants would sell French wine. Later Italian wines came into play, but I suppose it’s all coming back to what were the factors that made our guide successful. The book came out after the reunification and at that time the Germans began being proud of themselves again and they took an interest in their own wines.

Thirdly, what I think also helped us is that Armin Diel (co-author of the guide — E.S. )and I had a column in Capital, largest financial magazine in the country, for several years. Then we were writing in Alles uber Wein and had become known as the two people who knew about German wines.

Today there are a lot of other people who have expertise on German wines but we were in the right place in the right time.

– The producers were beginning to realize that there was a change occurring in the market. Most wine estates were not doing very well financially. The only producers that were really happy about their situation were the ones fortunate enough to have good exports. Most of those were making sweet wine in the northern part of the country. So there was a great interest from the majority of the producers in seeing more written about German wine. I think they’d all been jealous for years of what was happening in other markets, that the French and the Italians were proud of their wines and wrote a great deal about them. And so the producers saw this as an opportunity. Obviously, once you begin writing critically about what is happening, you do not only make friends. Those producers who we thought were particularly good, were very pleased. Even those who are not considered the top in their individual region (they are still a majority), would probably be honest enough to say ‘Yes, we don’t make wines as good as our neighbours do, but we are happy that a guide like this exists because it’s better that there is someone who talks about German wine as a whole. If our neighbours as able to raise their prices from 5 to 10 euros, then we can raise ours from 3 to 5’. Generally it’s been a boom for the industry as a whole.

Most German consumers had been drinking French or Italian wines before. We gave them a map — where to go and who to see and what to buy. Readers mostly look for two or three things. Firstly, who are the top producers — those who we give 4 or 5 grapes. Today there are only 25-30 top producers. Readers also look at the charts of what were the best wines of the vintage. The third most popular question is about estates that make the best value for money. We specially give them two pages and mark them in the book.

– I can’t say it was our exclusive decision. We were first to have done it in Germany, but most of the guides in France had done something similar in the past. In America this rating system was also becoming popular at that time.

I think today it is still necessary to rate both — a wine and a producer because a producer can be one of the top ten in the country, but the vintage was not very good in his region. He might be one of the best producers in the area, but he cannot do magic. He can only work with the fruit that he harvested. On the other hand, you can have producers that are perhaps generally not quite as good but they had a great vintage and their wine can play up with the best.

– In the original book all prices are listed. Those are the prices that you would pay if you were a consumer and you visited the estate and bought a wine there.

The pricing works out reasonably well in Germany. It becomes more difficult at the export markets and this is the reason we no longer publish prices in the English guide. For export you have more people that are being fed in the chain of distribution. Sometimes you have an importer, a wholesaler and a retailer, sometimes only an importer and a retailer. In Germany you will only have a retailer, so you cut at least one extra link in the distribution chain. In addition you have excise duties and different taxes that do not exist in Germany. Another problem is that duties and taxes have not been harmonized.

– For the first 5 years there were only two of us. There are a number of reasons for why the group of tasters expanded. When we began, we listed only 263 producers in the book which were chosen out of 300. We allowed each one of them to send 6 different wines. To be honest that is probably the way things were back then. But things have changed dramatically in Germany as they have had elsewhere. There is a new generation that has taken over in their fathers’ footsteps; they want to make better wines. There has been a lot more interest across the border to making better wines. Today you cannot say there are only a hundred estates doing a good job. There are probably 300. In the first book we portrayed a producer on a full page. In the most recent book we have 800 producers. These 800 were chosen out of almost 900 that we invited to send samples. Today we have a new category ‘Other recommended estates’.

Now we allow producers to send 12 samples. Where it was about a thousand wines, it is probably 11,000 that we taste today. It’s physically impossible for two people to assess all wines in the short period of time that we have between when we can actually start tasting wines and when we have to publish our manuscripts. We taste from May till mid-September.

In the beginning Armin and I would taste the top estates in any region together and then one of us would take the rest of the wines from that region and the other would do another part. We always asked for 2 bottles of each wine. We put aside those that we found particularly interesting. When we were finished with the region, we tasted all of those again. At the end of the year we tasted in different categories — dry Riesling, spatlese, auslese across different wine growing regions.

Today we taste together with one or two of our colleagues who are responsible for each growing region as many as 20 estates to set the quality level in a given vintage. Then they taste the rest of the wines, putting aside the better. Three weeks later we put all the top wines on the table, tasting them in categories so that we then have a reasonably good understanding of how a given region fared, which producers did a better job, etc. We have a final tasting in the end of the year where we invite our regional chairmen and where we compare all growing regions. If I look at 2005, there is no question about the fact that it was an exceptional vintage in parts of the north (Mosel and Nahe), quite good in Rheingau, but the further south you went the more mediocre it became.

– Every producer mentioned in the book is invited to present his wines the following year. That is generally the lion’s share of what we taste. There are 100-120 different estates whose wines we’ve tasted in a given vintage but don’t recommend them. We keep track them, although don’t invite them back next year. We invite somebody else.

One of the reasons why it’s advantageous for us to have people who are responsible for a given region is that they have their own interest in staying abreast of what is happening there. We follow, of course, what other newspapers, magazines and guides write and we look to see if there is anything that they’ve noticed that we haven’t. We often have readers that write in and mention producers with improved quality.

Generally someone who is a good producer or who has become a better producer wants to be recognized for having done a good job. We get letters from winemakers who for example have taken an estate from a father, improving quality and ask for an opportunity to show results. We take that seriously and generally allow them to send us samples.

– It’s always nice to say this was what we thought the best collection of wines produced this year. Certainly the idea who made the best spatlese or red wine interests producers themselves. Anything about taste, colours is subjective and so it’s our opinion about what is the best. It’s the reason I like the fact that there are several guides declaring their preferences. It gives more people an opportunity to have their own bit of success. We know it from producers that if your wine is the best dry Riesling of a vintage it’s sold out the day after the book appears. In this way to a certain extent we are acquiescing to what a market wants. The publisher wants to sell the book and you sell a book better by giving readers what is the most interesting. Ours is not democracy because in the end of the day it’s Armin’s and my decision.

– The major trend has unquestionably been an improved quality. The other thing that’s the most obvious is there is a lot more attention to making great dry wines. If you look back a hundred, even 50 years ago, most German wine was dry. It was only in certain exceptional vintages that some late harvested wines did not ferment to dryness, but they were actually quite rare. In early1960s technology was able to make something that resembled a flavour profile of those great sweet wines. So the cheap wines which before had been dry became sweet. There’s been a lot of effort paid to making good dry wine nowadays and German consumers are drinking a lot more of it. In foreign markets wine tended to be in sweeter version so people thought all German wine tasted like this. That’s changing. Last year I did presentations on top dry Rieslings in a number of different places and I will do them next year, including in Moscow. Everywhere I went people were very impressed.