Tomorrow is once again German Unity Day. We will see images of the Brandenburg Gate, politicians will talk about the successful process of coming together in recent years (and about the AfD, which disputes this), and by the evening at the latest someone will point out that, even 36 years after reunification, East and West have still not become the same country everywhere – in fact, not at all. When it comes to wine, you can certainly spare yourself that speech. The situation is quite clear: Germany has not grown together.
Try ordering a wine from Saxony or Saale-Unstrut in a good restaurant in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt or Stuttgart. Not impossible. But about as unremarkable as a good Trollinger in a Swabian Besenwirtschaft (OK: admittedly, that is very polemical). The lists feature Rheingau, Mosel, Palatinate, Rheinhessen, Baden, Franconia, sometimes Austria, Italy and half the world in between. Meissen? Freyburg? Naumburg? Rather rarely. Yet East German wine is not an invention of reunification. Viticulture on the Saale and Unstrut has been documented since the Middle Ages, while Saxony can look back on more than 800 years. Meissen is regarded as the cradle of Saxon viticulture; in the 17th century, thousands of hectares of vines stood there and along the Elbe. On the Saale and Unstrut, there were even around 10,000 hectares in the early 16th century. These are not wine regions invented after 1990, where a few vines were planted out of structural-policy courtesy. They were wine country long before Germany knew that it would one day have an East Germany.
And yet, to this day, the West treats these wines a little like visitors from another republic. The great exception is Rotkäppchen. The sparkling-wine cellar in Freyburg is probably the most successful story of an East German winery after reunification. Founded in 1856, it became the country's largest sparkling-wine producer in East Germany as a state-owned enterprise. After 1990, sales initially collapsed, the workforce shrank dramatically, and in 1993 a management buyout followed. Then something happened that did not fit the usual post-reunification narrative: the East bought the West. Rotkäppchen became Rotkäppchen-Mumm, today Germany's market leader in sparkling wine. Of course, that does not make Rotkäppchen a Saale-Unstrut sparkling wine in the narrower sense. A corporation of this size works with wines from far beyond the region. Only special bottlings explicitly draw on grapes from Saale-Unstrut. That is no reason to turn up one's nose, though: Rotkäppchen produces accessible mass-market sparkling wine, and apparently quite a lot of people want to drink precisely that. Wine intellectuals occasionally tend to imagine that popularity is already a quality defect. That is nonsense. Rotkäppchen is not grower Champagne, nor does it claim to be. It is an industrial success story from Freyburg. And one of the few East German brands where, after unity, it was not the West that swallowed the East, but eventually the other way round.
With wine proper, the story was more complicated. Saale-Unstrut now has just under 900 hectares of vineyard area. It is small, dry and quite far north. Little precipitation, winter and late frosts: for a long time, viticulture here was work at the climatic limit. The sheltered river valleys form pockets of warmth, while shell limestone and Bunter sandstone define many sites. The result is often not rich, full-bodied wines, but light, precise, acidity-driven ones. After 1990, the winegrowers there had to do more than restructure their businesses. They had to regain an identity. Private independence was difficult in East Germany, and viticulture was heavily shaped by state and co-operative structures. The fact that Lützkendorf from Bad Kösen, a Saale-Unstrut estate, and Schloss Proschwitz from Saxony joined the VDP as early as 1996 was therefore more than merely joining an association. It was a declaration: we do not want to be treated as folkloric East German wines, but to compete in Germany's fine-wine sector.
Saxony, for its part, now has just over 500 hectares. The vineyards stretch along the Elbe around Dresden, Radebeul and Meissen. Anyone who has once walked through the terraces there immediately understands why this landscape has little in common with Rheinhessen. It is viticulture of walls, small parcels, steep terraces and northern light. Riesling now once again occupies the largest vineyard area, alongside Müller-Thurgau, Pinot Blanc, Traminer, Pinot Noir and a surprising number of other varieties. Is that precisely where the misunderstanding lies? The West still likes to view these regions as belated versions of itself. Saxony is then supposed to be a small Rheingau, Saale-Unstrut a northern Moselle. But why, actually? The most interesting East German winegrowing begins where it stops trying to imitate West German wine.
And by now, you even have to leave Saxony and Saale-Unstrut for that. Brandenburg was once wine country. From the Middle Ages until the 19th century, vines stood along the Oder and Neisse, in the Havelland, around Cottbus and in the Fläming. Afterwards, they largely disappeared. Today they are returning. In Pillgram, not far from Frankfurt an der Oder, the Patke family runs a proper winery. The grapes grow on their own land, are harvested by hand, and the wines are officially allowed to call themselves Brandenburg Landwein. To West German ears, that still sounds a little like pineapple from Mecklenburg. That is precisely the problem. It gets even more remarkable in Neuzelle. Cistercians had already practised viticulture there. In the 18th century, Abbot Martinus had vines from Burgundy planted on the ‘Scheibe’. Wine was produced until 1840, then there was a gap of around 160 years. In 2002, the Neuzelle monastery winegrowers began reviving the vineyard. Today, wine is growing once again within the Baroque monastery complex. Not a major business, but cultural work with pruning shears.
And then there is Wolkenberg in Lusatia. This vineyard should not really exist at all. The village of Wolkenberg was demolished for the Welzow-Süd open-cast lignite mine. After the coal had been extracted, a new south- to south-west-facing slope was created from millions of cubic metres of earth. Beforehand, researchers had worked together to test which vines could cope with Lusatia's continental climate and the reclaimed soils. Today, among others, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris, Red Riesling, Schönburger, Rondo and Cabernet Dorsa grow there. A vineyard on a former open-cast lignite mine: it is hard to fit more German history into a bottle.
And presumably that now even constitutes the East's intellectual advantage. West German viticulture has an immense tradition. Mosel, Rheingau, Palatinate, Baden, Franconia: famous sites, classifications, family histories, inheritances, rules and a fairly precise idea of what great German wine should look like. That is a treasure. But it can also be a burden. In the East, much of this was interrupted by war, East Germany, expropriation, collectivisation and finally the radical economic transformation after 1990. Historically, that was no advantage and should not be romanticised. But as a result, today's viticulture in some places has less reverence for the phrase: ‘That is how we have always done it.’ Climate also plays a part. What used to be a disadvantage is shifting. A northern location by no means guarantees a rosy future – drought, late frost and extreme weather remain considerable risks. But warmer growing seasons make places interesting for quality wine that West German winegrowers would have laughed at just a few decades ago. Brandenburg is the most radical example of this.
Perhaps Germany's wine map is therefore being redrawn once again. Not along the old border, but across it. The strange thing is that many wine drinkers in the West have not noticed yet. Tomorrow, Germans will celebrate 36 years of German unity. Politically, economically and socially, there will once again be arguments about how much unity has actually come about. With wine, the answer is simpler. The West continues to drink predominantly West. The East has long been producing wines that hardly anyone in the West knows. But in the East, they drink them. And they enjoy it. And with a certain pride, too.