As we walked up towards the famous Hermannshöhle vineyard in the Nahe, I was slowing everyone down by stopping to photograph the steep vines. Helmut Dönnhoff turned and shouted back to us.
“Hurry up! There are beers waiting for us at the end!”
He has known this vineyard all his life. It was replanted in 1949, the year he was born, and as he showed us the damage left on the canes by the April frost, he explained how unusual it was for frost to reach this site at all.
“Cornelius did not believe that frost could happen here,” he said of his son, who now makes the wine. “Now he knows that anything can happen.”
1971 and 2017
Helmut’s first vintage was 1971, one of the finest of the century, and we joked that it was a tough standard to live up to for the rest of his career. On the drive up to the Felsenberg vineyard, I asked him how working the 2017 vintage compared with 1971.
He thought about it for a while, slowing the van right down to glance at the vines as though they were children playing by the roadside.
“The difference is that the weather was very mild,” he said. “Long periods of gentle sunshine. Not too much rain, not too much heat. There were no extreme events. That is the difference between the weather now and then.”
The average temperature, he told us, has risen by 1 to 1.5°C since the 1970s. At almost 50 degrees north, he admitted that the riper fruit is welcome, but he was clear that warming is bad news for winemakers in hotter places, particularly the south of France. It has also changed what’s possible in the Nahe.
“It wasn’t possible to make 4 grams of residual sugar in the 1950s and 1960s,” he said, referring to the bone-dry style of wines such as the 2016 Dellchen Riesling Grosses Gewächs.
The storm
By now, dark clouds were gathering over the valley. At Felsenberg, we climbed through nettles and up old stone steps to the castle ruins to look out along the river, as big drops of rain began to land on my camera.
I asked him one last question. Over all those years, what had changed the most, the vineyard or the winery?
“The vineyard,” he said, and that was as far as we got before we ran back to the van just as the downpour began. Within minutes, rivulets of water were running down through the vines towards the river.
We drove slowly back to the village of Oberhausen through sheets of rain on the winding roads, with Helmut gauging how much slate and soil would be washed down the hillside. The rain stopped the moment we pulled up at the restaurant, as if on cue, and it was finally time for that beer.
Winery facts: Dönnhoff (at the time of my visit)
Winemakers: Helmut Dönnhoff and Cornelius Dönnhoff
Estate: Hermann Dönnhoff, VDP member
Location: Oberhausen, between Niederhausen and Schlossböckelheim in the rocky landscape of the middle Nahe
History: The Dönnhoff family arrived in the Nahe more than 200 years ago and gradually turned a modest farm into a wine estate by acquiring top vineyards. Since making his first vintage in 1971, Helmut has added more of the region’s finest sites, including Kirschheck, Dellchen and Krötenpfuhl.
Vineyards: 25 ha
Grapes: Riesling 80%, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris 20%
Vine age: 15 to 60 years
Production: 150,000 bottles
Top sites: Hermannshöhle (Hermann’s cave), Felsenberg (rocky hill), Kirschheck (cherry hedge), Dellchen (little dell), Brücke (the bridge), Krötenpfuhl (toad pond), Kahlenberg (bare hill), Leistenberg and Höllenpfad (path to hell)
This visit was part of the 2017 Masters of Riesling trip with Awin Barratt Siegel Wine Agencies.
11 July 2017
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