(Manfred Klimek, animated pic: runwayml)
These are the cases I actually do not want to believe, because they fit Germany's current situation too well. Roman Niewodniczanski makes one of his best wines at the Saar – and is not allowed to sell it as such. Not because the wine would not be good enough. Not because it had faults. But because it does not fit the rulebook. No seal, no classification, no premium status. A top wine, formally downgraded. And that at one of the region's most visible estates, Van Volxem. And at one of the world's best-known German vineyards: the Scharzhofberg – legendary!
You have to slowly let this sink in. There is someone standing in the vineyard with his team, working precisely, thinking further than the average person, putting a wine into the bottle that has everything we could wish for – and then failing not in the cellar, not in the market, but on the form. On the fucking form.
On regulations that determine what a wine has to be before it has even been drunk. This is not a marginal phenomenon. This is the system. And it happens to affect a winemaker from an entrepreneurial family that grew wealthy with Bitburger beer and Gerolsteiner mineral water – in other words, from an environment that understands markets, can manage brands and knows how to position products. This very background makes the case even more remarkable.
Over decades, German wine-growing has built itself a set of rules that promises security. Origin, style, classification – everything neatly ordered, graded and controlled. That has advantages. It creates orientation, trust, a feeling of reliability. But it also has a downside. And that becomes apparent whenever someone works outside this framework. When someone like Roman Niewodniczanski makes a wine at Van Volxem that is perhaps more deliberate, perhaps more precise, perhaps simply different from what was intended.
Because the system does not primarily reward quality. It rewards conformity. And that is unsuitable for quality wine-growing – unsuitable in general.
Those who stay within the lines receive their seal, their provenance, their marketing opportunity. Those who shift these lines, even slightly, lose precisely that. And suddenly there is a wine that convinces in the glass but has to remain silent on the label. No “Großes Gewächs”, no premium indication, no clear place in the system. For the consumer, it becomes invisible. For the winemaker, economically more difficult. That this should happen to Roman Niewodniczanski, who, with Van Volxem, stands for precision and ambition at the Saar like hardly anyone else, alongside a handful of others, seems like a textbook example.
That is the real absurdity. A system that wants to safeguard quality prevents, in certain cases, precisely the quality it ought to produce.
And it does not stop at wine.
This form of over-regulation has long since become a background hum running through many areas of the country. Permits, regulations, responsibilities – everything regulated, everything safeguarded, everything controlled. And at the same time, this creates an inertia that does not promote innovation but slows it down. Not loudly, not spectacularly. But constantly. A state that has calibrated itself so finely that in many places it administers more than it enables.
Wine-growing is a particularly good example of this, because the consequences are so directly visible here. Wine is not a theoretical product. It is in the glass. You can taste it, compare it, assess it. And when this wine is good, very good even, the discrepancy between rule and reality is immediately palpable. That is precisely what the Van Volxem case shows.
I could say: Then the winemaker should simply work outside the system. Many have been doing that for a long time. Landwein, their own categories, new routes to market. But that is not a solution, especially in the case of the Scharzhofberg. Because the existing system remains in place. With all its market mechanisms, its visibility, its power.
Germany is good at building systems. Very good, in fact. But sometimes, in doing so, it forgets what these systems were actually intended for. They are meant to enable, not prevent. They are meant to organise, not suffocate.
Roman Niewodniczanski's Scharzhofberger will nevertheless be drunk – that it will not happen: the mountain's name is too great in the wine world for that. It will never tell the story of a failure. But, to a small extent, the story of present-day Germany's failure.