(Claude Auguste / Editorial team / animated pic: runwayml)
Twenty years ago, Carolin Spanier and Hans Oliver Spanier were regarded in Rheinhessen as more than merely ambitious. Many considered them slightly crazy. Two young, good-looking members of the bourgeoisie who were convinced that Rheinhessen of all places – this region that people in the Rheingau and on the Moselle liked to mock as “replanted potato fields” – could produce great, precise, long-lived dry white wines. World-class ones, at that. And that was what immediately interested me, being somewhat older than the two of them.
At the beginning of the 2000s, Rheinhessen was indeed vast in terms of area, but in terms of image it was still trapped deep in the shadow of Germany’s prestige regions. A great deal of volume, a great deal of co-operative production, a great deal of simple wine sold by the litre. In many traditional regions, the idea that a new winegrowing avant-garde could emerge here of all places was considered, to put it subtly, grotesque. Great dry Rieslings? From Hohen-Sülzen? From the Zellertal border region (OK: there had already been a certain tradition of individual vineyard sites there)? From an area that had stood for uncomplicated Schoppen wines for decades, for swaying, boozy drinking to Heino songs?
Yet that was precisely where Carolin Spanier and H.O. Spanier began their campaign against mediocrity, and they did something that almost the entire surrounding industry laughed at back then: they switched to biodynamics at an early stage. Together with Philipp Wittmann, they were among the very first serious biodynamic estates in Rheinhessen. Today, biodynamics has long been part of an international quality discourse. Twenty years ago, in many places it was an occasion for ridicule. Giving up chemical aids? Many winegrowers considered it esoteric nonsense. Some said so openly, others behind closed doors.
The Gillot-Spaniers carried on regardless because they noticed that their soils were becoming more vibrant, their grapes were ripening with greater precision and their wines were gaining tension. That is an important distinction. At Battenfeld-Spanier and Kühling-Gillot, biodynamics was never folklore, but a means to an end. And the end was always the same: better wines. Then there was the experiment of merging two essentially different wine estates into one estate and, with it, subsuming the historical narratives, particularly that of Kühling-Gillot, into a fresh, new legend – simply drawing a line under it. Without needing lawyers like me to do so.
Above all, however, the two understood something early on that few people grasped at the time: Germany would only become great again internationally through dry fine wines. Not through residual-sugar romanticism, but through provenance, precision and structure.
At the Roter Hang in Nierstein, which Carolin Spanier brought with her from the family tradition, Rieslings emerged that developed a salty sense of drama. Pettenthal, Rothenberg, Ölberg and Hipping are now counted among Europe’s great dry Riesling sites. And H.O. Spanier began to rethink the Zellertal in parallel. An area that for a long time hardly anyone took seriously. Limestone soils, cool air currents, an almost Burgundian clarity of acidity – he recognised all this very early on. Kirchenstück, Frauenberg and Schwarzer Herrgott became wines that showed that the upper Rheinhessen could also offer depth, tension and ageing potential.
We must never forget that all this happened at a time when German wine was only just beginning to shake off its infernal post-war provincialism. The old labels, the old-fashioned language, the sluggishness of many estates – the Spaniers countered all this with a new aesthetic. Clarity. Architecture. Precision. International relevance. Without producing Americanised fruit bombs for export.
Economically, the newly married couple took risks that people are happy to forget today. Renovating great sites, working biodynamically, building international markets, modernising the cellar, rebuilding a tasting house and the family home – all of this cost money. A great deal of money. While others were still debating, the Spaniers were already investing in a future they saw more clearly than many of their colleagues.
Today, after 20 years of working together as an estate, Battenfeld-Spanier and Kühling-Gillot are long-established names. Their wines are traded through the Place de Bordeaux, they are among the most important German export estates in the premium segment, and young winegrowers look to them for guidance, just as people once looked to French models. What remains particularly interesting is the speed of this rise. Twenty years is nothing in winegrowing. One generation. No more.
And that is the pair’s primary achievement: proving how quickly wine regions can change when people are prepared to work against ridicule, sluggishness and security – to swim against the current. The “potato fields” regions suddenly produced some of Europe’s most precise dry Rieslings.
And those who laughed back then now rather enjoy drinking these wines themselves.