Element 2: The barrique barrel
Probably the first to use a barrique barrel on German soil was Fritz Keller of the restaurant and winery “Schwarzer Adler” from Oberbergen. Thanks to his father’s good contacts with Charles Rousseau, Keller was able to visit Gevrey-Chambertin as early as the 1970s – unusual for the time. At home, he first put a red wine in a Burgundy pièce in 1979 – and promptly got a brush-off from the state quality wine testing agency, which refused to give the wine an official test number because of the wood tone. For this reason, Keller’s Pinot Noirs from the barrique barrel remained “table wines” until the end of the 1980s.
Similar rejection happened to others, and to this day, with exemplary wines; for example, the réserves of the legendary Kallstadt winemaker Bernd Philippi, and also the members of the H.A.D.E.S. group in Württemberg. Nevertheless, in the course of the eighties the small oak barrels gradually popped up in more and more cellars, and groups such as the German Barrique Forum or H.A.D.E.S. were formed to promote the exchange of experiences. Slowly but steadily grew the knowledge of handling and the method of pressing necessary for oak contact.
The first German Pinot Noir to cause a sensation internationally, at least among a small circle of insiders, was the 1985 Assmannshäuser Höllenberg from August Kesseler. Kesseler was able to build on the reputation of Assmannshausen. If there was a German Pinot Noir provenance that had a certain standing even in the post-war period, it was the Rheingau red wine enclave known for the ripe vintages from Kloster Eberbach.
Kesseler filled his Barrique Pinot Noir into a 0.5-litre bottle and put it on the price list for an unprecedented 30 German marks. Unlike many colleagues, he received an official test number for this radiantly fruity wine: “The viticultural office itself, wine commissioner Reinhold Schwalbach, winemakers Norbert Holderieth and Count Matuschka-Greiffenclau thought it was exciting and courageous of me,” Kesseler recalls, “the testers couldn’t help themselves!”