The wine zeitgeist is that place is now more important than time, but labelling bottles as hyper local is not as trainspottery as it sounds
Over the centuries, winemakers have come up with all sorts of systems and terminology to talk up the quality of their wines. One of the best known and still most widely used rankings singles out time as the most important factor: the basic thinking behind classifying a rioja reserva or gran reserva as in some way special is that the longer a wine has spent ageing in barrel and bottle before it is released, the more refined it will be.
For the Germans, preoccupied with ripeness in what was, pre-climate crisis, a difficult place to ripen grapes consistently, it made more sense to build a vinous hierarchy based on sugar rather than oak, in which the higher the levels of sugar in the grape must at harvest, the better the wine should be, from the lowest and lightest, kabinett, to the intensely sweet and concentrated late-harvested, “dry-berries” of trockenbeerenauslese.
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