Cellar-able Ahr Pinot Noir - Wine & Spirits Magazine

Wine of the Week

Cellar-able Ahr Pinot Noir

by Tara Q. Thomas • June 1, 2020

The Bertram family has been farming vines for more than a century in the Ahr, one of Germany’s smallest and most northerly wine regions. Julia Betram, the fifth generation, started working at a neighboring winery—the acclaimed pinot-noir house of Meyer-Näkel—right out of high school; after finishing her wine studies at Geisenheim, she returned to her home winery in 2014. She officially took over in 2017, the same year she bottled this wine. It comes from the younger vines on her 17 acres, all farmed organically. Vinified with ambient yeasts and aged for a year in barrels from Meyer-Näkel, the wine is smoky, earthy and elegant right out of the bottle, and gets only more so with a day of air. The flavors grow deeper and gamier, with a roast beef–like edge. The fine tannins feel like they’ve been whipped into the cherry fruit, giving the wine a creamy texture. Although this is Bertram’s simplest wine, it’s deserving of a place in the wine cellar, and will make a dinner of duck legs positively celebratory. NB: After marrying Benedikt Baltes (Weingut Steintal), she’s changed the name of the winery to Bertram-Baltes.

Schatzi Wines, NY

93

Julia Bertram 2017 Ahr Handwerk Spätburgunder

$28

Every week, our editors highlight a wine that intrigued them in our blind panel tastings, expanding on their tasting note in this space. These are entirely editorial choices; there are no paid placements. Subscribers can also access the original tasting note by searching here.

Tara Q. Thomas

is W&S’s editor at large and covers the wines of the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe for the magazine.

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TAGS Ahr Germany Pinot Noir W&S June 2020

David Paradela
Associate Editor

David joined Wine & Spirits in 2021 after immersing himself in the world of wine at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally from Boston, he graduated from Boston University with a degree in English and completed a master’s degree in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College in 2021. Prior to working at the magazine, he served as an editor and staff writer for the music blog Sound of Boston and worked in scientific publishing. Aside from wine, he loves basketball, arguing about Taylor Swift’s best album, and everything Greta Gerwig touches.

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Corey Warren moved to New York in 2015—fifteen years too late to join The Strokes—after earning a degree at Cornell in Comparative Literature. He started polishing glasses at Betony and threw himself into the restaurant world. Later, while a captain at Aquavit, he began working part time in the Wine & Spirits tasting department. Now, in addition to running tastings, he serves as critic for the wines of the Loire, Southern France, Argentina and South Africa. Corey likes almost anything bubbly, from Miller High Life, the Champagne of beers, to Champagne, the Champagne of Champagne, but he’ll drink anything once, and loves finding unique wines.

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Since Tara Q. Thomas joined Wine & Spirits in 1997, she’s traveled the wine world from Argentina to Australia. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, with more than 20 years of experience in the food and wine world, Tara puts her culinary knowledge to use as W&S’s resident food critic, and is the critic for the wines of Austria, Germany, Eastern Europe, Argentina, and the Mediterranean. She’s particularly enthusiastic about the wines of Greece, where she once lived and cooked. Outside of W&S, Tara has authored two books, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine Basics and The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Wine; contributed to the Oxford Companion to Cheese as well as Oxford’s forthcoming volume on spirits; and writes a wine column for Culture: The Word on Cheese.

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Patricio Tapia
Senior Correspondent

After graduating with a degree in journalism from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Patricio Tapia attended Bordeaux University in France, where he studied for a diploma in wine tasting and winemaking. Since then, he has visited wine regions around the world and authored several books, including his annual Descorchados, a Chilean wine guide; The Wines of Colchagua Valley; TodoVino and Wines for Great Occasions. Tapia is also the South American correspondent for The Oxford Companion to Wine, The World Atlas of Wine and Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Book. For the past three years, he’s been a host on the El Gourmet channel in South America. At Wine & Spirits, Tapia is the critic for the wines of Argentina, Chile and Spain, and regularly contributes articles on these regions.