Real Pinot from J.L. Wolf in Wachenheim/Pfalz
2008 Spätburgunder (yes, 2008!)
Weingut J.L. Wolf
€ 8,50
Sometimes you get lucky and a wine which seemed unremarkable in its youth gets that extra bit of bottle age it needed to coax the best out of it and make it something special. Then you have the old fairy tale of the ugly duckling in your glass! But even when this minor miracle happens in a wine merchant’s cellar you still need to discover that wine is there! In this case it took a message from beyond the grave (thank you John Boys MW, we miss you very much!) to move me to Weinhandlung Suff in the heart of the Berlin district of Kreuzberg where I found a great Pinot Noir red for everyday drinking.
What makes this wine special is that it isn’t just fruity and soft as most Pinots at this price level are, but also has some healthy dry tannins which make it way more interesting and give it some real backbone. OK, if you drink it from a relatively small glass then the fruity aromas (red berries) will be dominant, but if you drink it from a large well-rounded wine glass, then suddenly you’ll smell autumn leaves and spicy aromas normally associated with high-end Pinots costing many times more what this regular guy does.
By the way Suff means to hit the bottle in German, and Weinhandlung Suff is everything you might imagine a cool Berlin wine merchant could be and more. There you’ll find many discoveries waiting to be made!
By the way, the story of John Boys MW will follow here at a later date.
€8,50 from
Weinhandlung Suff
Oranienstraße 200
10999 Berlin-Kreuzberg
Tel.: 030 / 6 14 21 48
Email: suff@suffberlin.de
Web: www.suffberlin.de