Dr. Heyden Pinot Noir

The Estate... Located in the Nierstein area of the Rheinhessen region, Heyden's vineyards total an area of 11 hectares, with holdings in top Oppenheim sites such as the Sackträger, Herrenberg, Schloss and Kreuz. The estate has a short history, being started in 1999, but was awarded the state merit prize in 2004, and in the same year, Frank Heyden was awarded the German Oenologists Prize.

The Land... The Rheinhessen is a difficult area to organize. It isn’t easily fragmentable into clusters of information. It is a large (61,000 acre) and relatively undifferentiated mass of towns that have an unnerving tendency to end with the suffix “heim.” It boggles my mind and resists compartmentalization. Take a map of the area out of context and one is left to look at a Wisconsin-shaped blob surrounded to the east and north by the Rhein. Because wine towns are scattered across a large landmass, the growers who are reshaping the region are often working in isolation from each other, and far from the Rhein. Young idealists at estates like Gysler (Weinheim), Wittmann (Westhofen), Wagner-Stempel (Siefersheim) and Dr. Heyden (Oppenheim) are creating a degree of recognition for their recently anonymous hometowns. Much of the current action is occurring far from Bingen, a mirror of Rudesheim across the Rhein, and Nierstein, a flagship for Riesling and the region as a whole, a crucial wine center in the middle of a sea of red sandstone. The stretch of vineyard land lining the Rhein between these two towns has been a steady source of good and great wine, even when most of the region was not.

The Wine... This Spätburgunder (pinot noir) from the Oppenheim vineyards is labeled in Germany with the name “Tradition.” It is a wine that is produced according to traditional methods, i.e. fermenting on the mash and long maturing in old oak cask to give it a soft, smooth character and solid, yet elegant structure with fine berry fruit.