German Chardonnays Find Their Footing

Chardonnay is both ubiquitous and despised, neither for good reason.

The grape is grown all over the world, more for reasons of commerce than of quality. This has meant a lot of mediocre and bad chardonnay, which has led many wine lovers to dismiss it categorically.

That’s a shame, because a lot of great chardonnays are made as well, and from a growing number of places, many of which have never been associated with top-quality chardonnay. Oregon is one example. New Zealand is another.

But I want to focus here on chardonnay from Germany. I’ve had some bottles over the last couple of years that have been so good that I’ve become a believer. A recent dinner in New York at which two dozen German chardonnays were poured, possibly the most comprehensive tasting in the United States to date, confirmed this view.

The wines were not merely good, they were distinctive, a necessary component when trying to break into a global market with a grape as omnipresent as chardonnay.

The best German chardonnays I’ve had walk a tightrope between the freshness and energy that comes from lively acidity and the subtle flavors of ripe, but not overripe, grapes.

This balancing act allows for a full range of savory saline and stony mineral flavors, very different from the flamboyant fruitiness and buttery expanse of the reviled California chardonnays of old. I also like the relatively low levels of alcohol, generally around 12 percent.

Not all the chardonnays served at the dinner were great. Some seemed flat or out of balance. But the best ones I tasted were superb.

Plantings of chardonnay in Germany are increasing rapidly, though it still trails far behind riesling, the most widely planted grape. In 2022, the latest year for which statistics are available, about 6,750 acres of chardonnay were planted, up from about 670 in 1995, according to the German Wine Institute, a trade organization.

That’s still a minuscule amount. California in 2022 had more than 87,000 acres of chardonnay.

Many of the best chardonnays come from a new generation of German winemakers who’ve grown up in the climate change era and who’ve traveled widely, getting to know the world’s wines and developing networks of producers rather than taking the more insular approach of previous generations.

These new chardonnay stars include names like Lukas Hammelmann and Jonas Dostert, Carsten Saalwächter and Moritz Kissinger, Jan Wongse Raumland, Ziereisen and Keller, an already illustrious producer in Rheinhessen known best for its rieslings, whose proprietors, Klaus Peter and Julia Keller, put their eldest son, Felix, in charge of their chardonnays.

The dinner was organized by a longtime collector, Robert Dentice, an investment banker who prefers to be identified as a “German wine geek.” He had always focused on riesling, the wines for which Germany is best known, and more recently spätburgunder, or pinot noir, and silvaner as well. But in the last few years these younger producers caught his eye.

“I noticed they were all focused on chardonnay, and they were really good,” he said.

What impressed him were the subtle differences with white Burgundy, the fountainhead of great chardonnay.

“They’re not just Burgundy substitutes,” he said. “They are unique in and of themselves, and it doesn’t hurt that Burgundy’s prices have gotten to crazy places.”

What accounts for the arrival of these German chardonnays? Certain wine regions like Rheinhessen, the Pfalz and the Obermosel have limestone soils, which chardonnay has a special affinity for, but the warming climate has made it possible to ripen chardonnay sufficiently to make superb wines.

Climate change influenced decisions to plant chardonnay in other ways as well.

“Climate change for us does not just mean it’s getting warmer and warmer, it means everything is getting more extreme — frost risk, weeks without rain, hailstorms,” said Klaus Peter Keller, who attended the dinner in New York with his wife, Julia. “Therefore, we must spread the risk a bit more than we would 30 or 40 years ago. Rather than 100 percent riesling we have now 70 percent riesling, 15 percent pinot noir, 10 percent chardonnay and 4 percent others, and we think that will be the structure for the coming 30 or 40 years.”

Mr. Keller said he had wanted to plant pinot blanc rather than chardonnay but that their son Felix had pushed for chardonnay.

“Felix was right,” he said. “Chardonnay is much better adapted to climate change, with thicker skins, and it transmits the soil much better than pinot blanc.”

Felix Keller said by email that his grandfather had tried planting chardonnay in 1988, but that the timing had been wrong.

“Back then, it didn’t ripen every year,” he said. “It took us until 2018 to try again. We believe chardonnay has a bright future in Germany because we now have the climate that used to be in Burgundy in the early ’90s.”

The Keller chardonnays are hard to find and expensive, a testament to its quasi-cult status as a riesling and pinot noir producer. Other producers, like Hammelmann, Dostert and Kissinger, are a little more available, though you will most likely have to find a good wine merchant who embraces Germany, which admittedly is not every wine shop.

Still, I was able to find an energetic, subtly complex 2022 chardonnay from Jonas Dostert in the Obermosel for about $45 and a taut lime-and-mineral 2022 chardonnay from Moritz Kissinger in Rheinhessen for $70, which still needs a couple of years of age to relax. These are not cheap wines by any means, but certainly less expensive than equivalent white Burgundies, which can cost several hundred dollars.

The Obermosel, or Upper Mosel, has historically been a rather obscure section of the greater Mosel Valley. Instead of the famous steep slate vineyards that are the sources of majestic rieslings, its dominant feature is limestone. The elbling grape, is more typical than riesling. But Mr. Dostert believes chardonnay is well suited to show the full potential of the region.

“The wines have to taste like Obermosel,” Mr. Dostert said by email. “Two attributes that I associate with the taste of Mosel are finesse and energy, coming from a moderate alcohol level and a playful acidity. To get there I try to reduce my influence in the cellar. The less you intervene in a wine, the more it shows the origin.”

Most of these young winemakers have worked in Burgundy or at least visited there. When working with chardonnay, it’s almost impossible not to be influenced by Burgundy. The Kissinger chardonnay in particular seemed quite Burgundian at this stage of its development. But most German producers will say they are not trying to reproduce Burgundy.

“It’s most important to find my own style and not try to copy anything,” said Lukas Hammelmann, whose 2020 Hochstadt Roter Berg chardonnay from the Pfalz, which I drank at the dinner, was stony and racy.

The challenge now is not to develop a German style of chardonnay, but to begin to understand regional styles and even the varied personalities of single vineyard chardonnays. That takes time and will require recently planted vineyards to age and mature over the next couple of decades.

“We need to learn the characteristics of the vineyards, so we’re not saying, ‘This tastes like Chassagne and this tastes like Meursault,’” Klaus Peter Keller said. “We need to speak in terms of our own vineyards.”

Other chardonnays I particularly liked at the dinner include a tense mineral 2022 WongSiri Bockenheimer Schlossberg from Jan Wongse Raumland in Pfalz; a floral, stony 2020 Jaspis Nägelin from Ziereisen in Baden; and a cool, textured 2018 from Carsten Saalwächter in Rheinhessen.

As good as the chardonnay is now, it’s important to remember it accounts for only a small fraction of the wine Germany produces. And it may remain that way.

“I don’t think it’ll become that widespread,” Mr. Dentice said. “Riesling will always be king and queen, but in the right hands, chardonnay has a future.”

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