Horst Sauer

– Franken

You know that gesture… the one where someone holds their upper arms straight down at their sides, their elbows at right angles, forearms parallel with the floor, upturned fists clenched and they pull their elbows back just an inch or two very positively… it’s usually combined with a half whispered but very emphatic ‘Yes!’

Well that’s the gesture that Sandra Sauer did as she ‘introduced’ us to her press. ‘Strange moment on the face of it, hugely telling if you were there and saw the fierce light of enthusiasm in her eyes. ‘Better than new shoes?’ I asked (that sounds so sexist now I’ve written it… oh God, did I actually say that?… bugger!) anyway… ‘yes’ was the answer. ‘Better than a new fast car?’, … ‘Much better!’… I stopped asking, I knew the answer!

The Press in question is a Scharfenberger and if you’ve a steep slope of old vine Silvaner, Riesling or Müller hovering right above your winery and you want to press the best juice whether it be Trocken or Auslese, or even Eiswein then a Scharfenberger is very demonstrably what you need. Descend further through this jewel like, beautifully fragrant, gravity fed winery though and you can’t help noticing that there’s ‘kit’ of this calibre on every floor… which wouldn’t matter a jot if there wasn’t a philosophy, if there wasn’t demonstrable skill of the highest order, if there wasn’t soul, if there wasn’t the detailed knowledge about how to persuade unruly old Silvaner vines to best direct their energy, if there wasn’t intuition, if there wasn’t… if there wasn’t…if there wasn’t…  but there is… because this is one of the few wineries in the whole darned World where it absolutely all comes together. If you’re bothered there’s literally hundreds of domestic and international awards to confirm it, if you don’t need or care about them then there’s about 140,000 bottles per year that should each do the job just as nicely.