Von Winning and the Garden of Paradise
Watch a casual chat between two of our buyers, Josh and Clara, below.
And tune in to our Instagram LIVE tasting with the V-W team on Friday, 2/12 @5pm EST.
Deidesheim is a delightful little medieval spa town that has attracted more than its share of visiting dignitaries: Margeret Thatcher, Gorbachev, the King and Queen of Spain, Vaclav Havel and even Dan Quayle! And that is pretty much how the rest of the world thinks about the village of Deidesheim. But to us, in the world of wine, Deidesheim brings to mind just one name, and it’s not the name of someone who has ever ruled a country. It is the estate of von Winning.
The estate of von Winning is old — about 160 years old. And the name von Winning is oldish — Leopold von Winning was a leader in Pfalz’s quality wine movement of the early 1900s. But the estate has only been named for von Winning since 2007, when Achim Niderberger purchased the property (then known as Dr. Deinhard) and hired Stephan Attman to run the show.
A revolution at Deidesheim ensued. Attman transformed the farming, adopting organics and many biodynamic techniques. In the winery, out went the shiny steel tanks and in came old-fashioned wooden casks (fuder). Winemaking became intensely pre-modern and minimalist: fermentations are slow and natural, without any yeast additions, lees stirring or even temperature control. After a few years of tinkering and adapting to the local vines, von Winning began to produce truly brilliant wines.
With the 2017s, von Winning convinced us that they were now making some of the world’s greatest white wines – rivals to even the finest dry whites of Germany and Burgundy. The 2019s, just now coming on to the market, are even better.
Von Winning is now, simply put, an estate that all wine lovers must get to know. There is no need to jump straight to their $100+ bottlings. In any case, they are not ready to drink yet. The Paradiesgarten, from a premier cru (erste lage) site in the hill above Deidesheim with an interesting mix of loam, loess and red sandstone soils, is a gem of a wine.
The Garden of Paradise may evoke the spa-like conditions that have attracted so many luminaries, but here it is the flavor that counts. The wine bursts with the white fruit and juicy peaches that you might expect from a young Pfalz Riesling, but beneath that simmers a sophisticated and detailed texture that carries through to a long satisfying finish – the von Winning touch.
The Paradiesgarten is the perfect wine for discovering von Winning, and the village of Deidesheim (the side that wine lovers care about!).
