In the first of a series of extended interviews with leading wine growers marking 20 years of The World of Fine Wine, Katharina Prüm of JJ Prüm in the Mosel tells David Williams about her experiences of wine growing over the past two decades.
David Williams: If the story of the past 20 years of fine wine has a single overarching theme, it’s been the remarkable return to primacy of wine’s fundamental agricultural nature. “Great wine is made in the vineyard, not in the winery” is a phrase that has become somewhat degraded by overuse by marketers of varying degrees of sincerity in recent years, but its essential truth has become only more apparent as the 21st century has progressed, a time when the wine grower, vigneron, or viñatero—the winemaker who spends as much time amid the vines as in the cellar—has become the emblematic figure in fine-wine production, eclipsing the all-powerful cellar technician who had emerged as the star of the late-20th century.
What better way, then, to hear the story of fine wine during WFW’s first two decades of existence than in the words of some of the world’s most accomplished, articulate, and influential vignerons?
Between them, in a series of extended interviews, our cast of nine wine growers offers a truly global perspective. Some of what they say is highly specific to their country, region, or vineyards. But inevitably they share preoccupations—from vine age, genetics, and pruning, to the merits (or otherwise) of organics and biodynamics and the ominous presence of that other overarching theme of fine wine’s present and future: climate change.
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Over the next fortnight, we will be publishing these vignerons’ stories one by one, starting today with a representative of one of Germany’s most important wine families: Katharina Prüm.
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An extreme beginning
Katharina Prüm: I joined my father at the winery in 2003, when I finished law school. It was a very unusual year, and in a way I’m really happy that I started with a vintage like that. You learn most if it’s something extreme—it’s more intense.
I remember before harvest, in summer, the grapes were ripe quite early. And I remember going into the vineyards in early August and it felt like my shoes would burn, and that was something we had never experienced before, my father and I.
My father was much calmer than other people, and I think that’s because he could remember the 1959 vintage, which he experienced as a very young man and which was also quite extreme. He drew a lot of parallels between the two years. In the weeks before and during harvest, a lot of younger growers stopped him and asked: “Well, what do we do?” They were panicking and he said, “Don’t start too early. The wines still need their time to mature.”
Of course you always have to remember we are in the Mosel, and not in the South of France; hot here is a different thing compared to hot in southern Europe. It was warm, but we didn’t have people dying because of the heat.
It was very unusual, but I sometimes think I would like to travel back to that year and experience it again with today’s experience and perspective. And I think I would experience it in a different way, because that year was extreme at the time, but it wouldn’t be at all unusual now.
The 2022 vintage was more extreme than 2003, because it was so dry. We didn’t have that dryness problem in 2003, and I see dryness as more of a problem than heat. And of course, we now have the experience. We have had more years like that. We had 2018, we had 2019, 2020, 2022, which were all very warm.
So, it’s really the dryness aspect. And even then, in 2003, my father said we would never have to worry about dryness because our slope always offers enough water.
This year we’ve had fantastic winter humidity, and I’m very glad for nature. I mean, it wasn’t very pleasant to go out, but the water in the soils for the forests and everything—they really needed it. But even though these winter rains are important, I don’t think they’re the key. More important is what happens in the main growing season, and in 2022, between April and August, we had very, very little rain. And if you compare that, for example, to the 2020 vintage, which had almost the same amount of sunshine hours, average temperature, and average rainfall, but in different periods, it was a completely different experience. And we did not at all face the challenges we had in ’22.
I grew up with the idea that the longer you wait, the better (more or less). My father was always somebody who waited as long as possible to get enough ripeness, because the Mosel is a very cool climate, and probably the biggest concern every year until the early 1990s was to get enough ripeness.
It was very important, of course, not to work with too high yields, but also to be patient enough and wait long enough to get that ripeness you need for complex, fantastic wines. And that perspective has changed now.
It’s no longer our aim to wait as long as possible and have only this kind of longer hang-time. Now we do sometimes have to start a bit earlier to get freshness, and we are not afraid of starting a week earlier, because the wines still have good complexity, because everything starts earlier, and that’s something we also have to consider.
On average, we now pick three weeks earlier than 20 years ago. When I was growing up, we usually started mid-October and then finished in mid-November, roughly speaking. Now, over the past couple of years, we’ve always started in September, with the exception of 2021.
In 2003, which was then the earliest harvest we’d done, we started on October 3, and even then we still thought there would never be a time when we would start picking in September. And now, since 2018, we have always started around September 18, except 2021 when we again started in mid-October. But that was a big exception.
The end of Eiswein?
Katharina Prüm: Different parcels behave differently every year, and the parcels that were maybe a little bit cooler, because they were higher up in the slope, for example, have generally done better over recent years, whereas before you might have said, “OK, those are the ones where you’d be lucky to have sufficient ripeness for Kabinett,” now, you have a good chance of producing Spätlese, or maybe even Auslese, from it.
But I wouldn’t be able to name a parcel that has got worse. All parcels now can potentially produce top wines—and that wasn’t the case 20, 30, or 40 years ago. And I don’t think we are producing more, or less, botrytized wine. I would say it’s the same, on average. The past three or four years, we produced less; but if you looked at the previous four years, it would be more. But in general, over the past 20 years, we’ve always had years when we had a very good amount of botrytis.
The only thing that I fear is getting rarer and rarer is Eiswein. The last one we produced was in 2012. We still get cool temperatures, but since the growing season has shifted earlier, and because you need the grapes to stay healthy for long enough on the vine until it gets cool enough, that’s getting more and more unusual.
Many changes in the vineyard; zero change in the cellar
Katharina Prüm: When it comes to the cellar, there’s been almost zero change over the past 20 years; in the vineyards there have been lots of different things.
We work a lot more with different yields. On the one hand, you don’t want to have yields that are too low, because that means the grape is driven even faster and your harvest is too early—and we don’t want to make that happen. On the other hand, with these more extreme weather conditions, you have to make sure the vine doesn’t have too many grapes, (a) for the quality of the wine, and (b) for the strength and the health of the vine.
That’s much more of a topic than it used to be, and the key decision is usually made at pruning, not in the summer. We want to give each vine the best starting position, which means pruning it in the best possible way. And while we cannot predict the season, it should be neither too high nor too low in yield.
As a general approach, we don’t like doing a green-harvest. But in 2022 we had to do a really severe one, because we saw the vines really suffering from the extreme dryness in the growing season. We went to all the places where we felt there was too much stress and cut individual bunches—we really did it vine-by-vine. That meant we lost a lot of crop; but it guaranteed the quality both for that vintage and longer term. And I think that was a very important decision in that year.
We have also become more and more conscious of how we do our pruning, adapting our methods as much as possible to what we have learned from the work of Simonit & Sirch. I mean, we were always careful to do it in the right way, but now we feel we understand the vine even better than we did before. We have two teams for pruning. The first one is more skilled and experienced, and they do the main cuts; they understand the vine and how the sap works. And then we have a second team, who are maybe not so experienced; people who do the cuts where you don’t have to have that knowledge.
We are also involved in a project with artificial intelligence, to help us understand the vine even better. It’s still under development, but it’s part of making sure we do our best to keep the vine long-term, to prevent it from having too much stress and keeping it as healthy as possible.
The timeless importance of vine age
Katharina Prüm: I grew up with the idea that vine age is important, but I appreciate and understand it better than ever now, because, with climate change, you really see the value of old vines.
If I look back ten years, I remember going to a symposium with a discussion about old vines and young vines, and there was a scientist who said there’s no difference in the quality of the wines they produce, which surprised me quite a bit at the time. I would say that if they were to do that event again now, the scientist would be saying something different. The vines have deeper roots, so they find water in the deeper areas. As with human beings, they also have more experience as they get older; you know better how to deal with extreme situations when you’re older than when you are a child.
So, we definitely value our old vines very highly, but they were always important for us. I remember when we had a reallocation process here in our vineyards, whereby the state took land for building bigger passes and new roads, which in general is a helpful idea. But it’s a very sensitive issue—and all the more so if you lose some of your vines. We had a lot of issues, including some legal issues, with the process. And I remember when it started about 20 years ago, even then a lot of people were laughing about “the Prüms with their crazy ideas about old vines.”
Another development is that we have a very high proportion of ungrafted vines at our estate, and we appreciate those, too. Over the past 20 years, we have made some selections we bought from nurseries, a small amount ungrafted. We also worked with Geisenheim University; they selected wood from certain parcels, grafting half and leaving the other half ungrafted for us to plant. It’s something I’m trying to find out more about, because I think it’s still a field that is not widely researched.
We have the impression that, particularly during harvest, with ungrafted vines you have a steadier, more consistent ripening and you are usually able to pick the grapes in a more perfect situation. With grafted vines, we sometimes experience something where the ripeness continues, you get almost to the ideal point, and then very suddenly it almost collapses, and the vines start to develop a little bit of rot. It’s nothing dramatic, but of course we work on a high level, and it’s these nuances that make a difference.
The vines are 40 to 50 years old on average. And what we usually do is use the system that my father called eternal viticulture (except in those cases where we had to replant a few parcels because they built new roads and they needed to adapt the parcels to the roads). If there’s a parcel with some vines that are dying of disease or old age, you replant just a single vine. We have these fantastic slate soils here, and they allow continuous monoculture, so we don’t have to take the vines out after 30 or 40 years and let the soils recover—we can just replace single vines.
Organic gray areas
Katharina Prüm: We are not certified organic or biodynamic. Not because we don’t care, but because sustainability and working organically is not the same thing. I wish it were, because it would make things much easier! But there’s not this easy black and white; usually there’s a lot of gray in between, and there’s no simple right or wrong.
We work organically in part, but copper is an example of this gray area, where I’m really swimming between the different ideas of what to do, and is it good to use it or not, because it’s a heavy metal. There are of course pros and cons, and some people say, well it’s in very small doses, so it’s nothing to worry about, while others say it’s a heavy metal that stays in the soil forever. Just the other day, I was reading an article about copper causing a species of bird to completely disappear.
We’re always discussing these issues. We don’t use herbicides. But for many other treatments, if you work organically, you have to spray much more often, which means you also have much higher CO2 emissions. We think sustainability is more important than organic. And we just try to do the best for nature. But there’s not one simple answer, unfortunately. And I can’t imagine a single situation where I felt it was harmful for our business not to be organic. When I explain our thinking, I’ve never had anyone look at me and say, “That’s not convincing for me.” And they would prefer you to be authentic, rather than putting it on the label for marketing reasons.
