Wine of the week: an utter stunner from Germany

(Image credit: David Weimann)

published 14 February 2020

2018 Spätburgunder ‘S’ Weingut Meyer-Näkel, Ahr, Germany £38.10, thewinebarn.co.uk

Iris Ellmann runs The Wine Barn and she is a German wine dynamo. Her website features a collection of estates from all over the country, covering all styles and grape varieties, and I can highly recommend looking at it if you are curious to discover more about top-flight German wines. I attended a portfolio tasting of Iris’s wines the other day and came across this utter stunner.

It is a beautiful pinot noir that won a mighty score in my notes. It manages to balance resplendent mid-palate fruit density with a sonorous aroma and cool, long finish. Germany is slowly becoming a force to reckon with in pinot noir and there are a good few world-class wines made there, but they tend to be fearfully expensive. Having said that, too many are still lean and foresty, so when buoyant, silky, exotically proportioned wine like this comes along, I sit up and pay attention.

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Meyer-Näkel is a pinot noir specialist and there are more expensive versions than my chosen ‘S’ cuvée in its portfolio. These Grand Cru wines load more oak onto their framework and I feel that this unbalances the whole and cramps their exuberance. This is why I love ‘S’ so much. With only 50% new barrels employed for 12 months, the oak merely seasons the ripe fruit and allows it to sing in the glass. This is a perfectly balanced pinot noir and represents great value for money.

• Matthew Jukes is a winner of the International Wine & Spirit Competition’s Communicator of the Year (matthewjukes.com)

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Matthew Jukes has worked in the UK wine business for well over three decades and during this time has written 14 wine books.

Matthew regularly lectures, judges, speaks at wine conferences and runs masterclass tastings for both corporate and private clients all over the world. Matthew is also the creator of his ground-breaking initiative, the One Day Wine School, an indulgent day of tasting and learning first performed in 2006.

He has been the MoneyWeek wine correspondent since 2006 and has written a weekly column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine since 1999. His four highly-acclaimed, annual wine reports – the Burgundy En Primeur Report, the Bordeaux En Primeur Report, the Piemonte Report and the 100 Best Australian Wines – are published on his website, www.matthewjukes.com.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading experts on Australian wine and, with Brisbane-based wine writer Tyson Stelzer, runs an annual competition in Australia to find ‘The Great Australian Red’. He was made Honorary Australian of the Year in the UK at the 2012 Australia Day Foundation Gala dinner.

Matthew is a winner of the International Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year Trophy. His thoughts, recommendations and tastings notes are followed very closely by the wine world at large.