Personalities

David Peppercorn: The object of buying wine is to drink it
«Magnum» №6-7(19) June-July 2007

Straight after the Egon Muller — Scharzhof tasting our correspondent Eleonora Scholes spoke to a famous wine expert, Master of Wine, consultant, wine merchant and author of several wine books David Peppercorn.

– Three very intense tastings — how do you feel?

– Stimulated. It’s a unique thing to have the opportunity of seeing such a range of wines from one estate. It’s a very-very rare tasting.

– Have you done any similar tastings before?

– Yes, I have done, more often with red wines. That’s in a way more difficult because it is difficult tasting a lot of red wines. It’s somehow easier to taste white wines, except I find that the acidity gets to you a bit eventually. For example, in red wines it wouldn’t be possible to drink the amount you have done. I was spitting out some of the acid wines.

– Which wines were the most memorable in the last session and why?

– One point I’d like to make and that is that there’s been a tendency in the past for German producers and lovers of German wine to equate the best with the sweetest. This tasting shows there are great wines at every level. There are some spectacular kabinett wines, especially great spatlese wines and, of course, fabulous ausleses. The things like the beerenausleses, the trockenbeerenausleses and the eisweins are the icing on the cake, but they are sometimes freaks of nature. They are not the everyday stuff. They show what the great domains can do, so to speak. For a particular estate like this it’s harder to ripen grapes. In the Middle Mosel the hills are lower and it’s easier to get ausleses than it is here. These are special conditions and I thought it underlined what marvelous wines they can produce at different level. You don’t have to only look for extraordinary, expensive sweet wines. There are wonderfully fruity, vibrant, zesty wines with lovely, fresh acidity. The other point here is that we don’t know when to drink these wines. In fact, they can be drunk and enjoyed much with food. I think it’s a very important point to make. A lot of people think you can drink only completely dry wines with food. Again, this tasting showed that’s not the case.

Now what were my highlights? There was a very good 1990 kabinett which stood out. Then we went onto some auslese eisweins which we don’t see today. The most interesting wines there were the 1973 and 1975 auslese eisweins. They showed how harmonious these wines can be because sometimes in ice wines you get a dichotomy between great sweetness and great acidity which can be rather unattractive. These wines had a mellow acidity and a lovely fruitiness. Then we had a row of spatleses. The 1995 vintage came up very well, and the 1997 vintage was extremely attractive.

The young auslese-2006 were enormously impressive. There were some instructive lesser vintages which show how even lesser vintages can produce quite interesting wines. But, of course the final thing were these wonderful goldkapsel ausleses which are the top. Some of these wines could have been classified as beerenausle, but they prefer to make them as Auslese Goldkapsel. There was a marvelous 1991, a particularly good for 1979, again, 1975 was very good, but for me the great vintage is 1997. So there was a great variety of wines.

– If you are to recommend these wines to the collectors, which ones will get more positive reviews than before?

– I’ve got in my cellar small numbers of bottles of some of these wines. The great thing is now to find what they are like without opening your own bottle. I can now look at my notes and say: “Let’s drink that and let’s keep that”.

What I would say to people is I hate using word ‘collector’. The whole object of buying wine is to drink it and to enjoy it. It’s rather like people who buy pictures they don’t like because somebody tells them they are important. Buy wines that suit your taste. With goldkapsel wines we were having a discussion. Michael Schuster who did the commentary didn’t like the 1979. Serena Sutcliffe and I adored the 1979. He liked the 1983, Serena liked it, I didn’t. But this is the matter of individual taste. In the top wines the individuality of the vintage is so strong that you can get enormously different wines in the joining vintages. That’s what makes it really interesting. When you get really into wine, one of the most rewarding things are comparisons.