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Germany's Pinot noir, mostly called Spätburgunder, is on the advance, a fact which has recently been confirmed by two renowned wine writers, Britain's Tim Atkin, who stated on his website "The other, more important thing was the impressive quality of the top wines. The words world class are over-used. But these Pinots were just that", and Ed McCarthy who echoed on www.winereviewonline.com "Pinot Noirs, known in Germany as Spätburgunders, are better than ever in certain regions, such as Baden".

In the last four months we have been able to taste close to 400 wines of the 2008 and 2009 vintages. If you add all the second and third bottles which we had to open - thank you everybody for still closing the wines with natural cork, if you know what I mean - we came close to 500 bottles tasted. Although our expectations had already been high, due to the good results of our last "Spätburgunder" tasting report, we still were deeply impressed by the outcome of the tastings this time: 38 wines have been attribute five stars out of five, 23 other wines got the five stars with a little question mark and another 36 wines were so close to a 5-star-ranking that they might as well achieve that goal with a little bit of ageing and maturing. Of course, purists might observe, the distance to the top of Burgundy's Pinots is still remarkable - to give you an example, in our latest Burgundy report we awarded three "dreamwine" ratings, although having sampled considerably less bottles, in Germany we found none - but the density of the top section is impressive.

Notwithstanding the generally positiv impression, it is worthwile to look at the details. While the wines from 2008 ended up at an average rating of three stars, slightly below the 4-star-bar, those from 2009 clearly surpassed that level. Looking at the individual regions, the best average results were achieved by Palatinate, Rhein-Hesse, Wuerttemberg and the Ahr, while the generally highly appraised region of Baden (fairly high alcohol, especially in 2009) came in on fifth place only. The only region where we preferred the 2008 vintage over the 2009 was the Rheingau.

One last remark. Only three out of the 20 top wines of our tastings were labeled "Großes / Erstes Gewächs", the VDP-equivalent of the french Grands Crus. Many so called Grands Crus wines, on the other hand, ended up in the lower echelons of our tasting. We thus ask ourselves if the VDP's claim to label only the top of Germany's wines as Großes Gewächs is not a little bit too pretentious. If, however, it is only a marketing manoeuvre in order to make wine prices rise, then the consumer can easily do without that category - at least as far as the reds are concerned.

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