Wasenhaus: It Doesn't Take Much to Make Vines Happy

Alex and Christoph Wolber met in Burgundy, spent nearly a decade working at some of the region's most respected domaines like de Montille, Leflaive, Pierre Morey, Comte Armand... and returned to Baden in 2016 to try making wine together. And since their first Wasenaus vintage sold out before it was even bottled, a decade later, they're still at it.

Words by Milan Nestarec and Lucie Kohoutová / Photos courtesy of Wasenhaus

— I think the story of the two of you would be a good basis for a script. Pinot noir, a shared passion for it, leading to studying and working in Burgundy, then coming back and founding Wasenhaus as a joint project. Netflix series when? [laugh] But seriously, how do you recall these beginnings? What were the key moments that made this all happen?

No film projects so far and that's probably for the better... Well, we had been flatmates, first in Meursault and then in Volnay, at Domaine de Montille, where I was working at the time. We met by chance when Christoph moved into my house in Meursault — he needed a place to stay while doing a season in the vines. I was doing an apprenticeship at Pierre Morey and told Christoph it was an interesting program if he wanted to stay longer in Burgundy, so he did the same program one year later.

Christoph was always set to go back home to Staufen — his family and girlfriend live there, and it's a wine region. A Pinot region. After he finished his studies, he moved back, and since we could drink well together, we had the idea to make a wine in Baden together. Just to give German Pinot a try. For Christoph it was a clear decision, but I had a good position at de Montille — moving back to Germany wasn't the plan at all. So we started in 2016, making one Pinot and one Weissburgunder together, plus some wines from the plots Christoph farmed. The result was pretty good but we knew we could do better, so we decided to do a second trial vintage. Since we sold out our first vintage before it was even bottled, we slowly started to think about eventually creating a winery together.

— Can you please tell us a brief history and story of the Wasenhaus farm, after which the domaine is named?

Wasenhaus is a small farmhouse outside the town of Staufen. It's the family home where Christoph grew up. It was never a winery — there are no cellars or anything like that. Christoph's mum had horses there, and still today different people use it to keep their horses. Wasen means meadows or prairie in the local dialect, and Haus is, well, house. So it's the little house in the prairie, if you will.

— Alex, you come from an architectural background, that's something I'm very interested in. An architect usually has a good sense of aesthetics, is that something that helps you when thinking about the quality of wine? Or is it not possible to think like that?

Hm, yes, of course a certain sense of aesthetics is always helpful, and I'm always drawn to the beauty of things — but honestly, Christoph is much more the artist. I'm the planner, more engineer than artist. In that way it helps me structure all the diverse work, scheduling, and so on.

— I'm curious about your time in Burgundy – you worked at a number of prestigious domaines, managing their vineyards. Can you name any aha moments or moments that shaped you and that you still draw from?

Of course, from all the wineries I worked at I learned something, and in the end it brought me to where I am today. It started already back in Dresden, where I learned to love wine and the beauty of farming vineyards — then Montalcino, where I first encountered truly hands-on biodynamic farming and very low-intervention winemaking, and discovered that you can still be precise within that. And Burgundy was and is always the holy grail for Pinot and Chardonnay. You come for the Pinot but you stay for the Chardonnay ;) You learn there that it doesn't take much to make good wine — even great wine — just good soil, decent plant material, decent work in the vineyards, staying cool, and everything will be fine. In Tuscany we worked obsessively clean on the fruit and made great wine; one year later in Burgundy we had the worst fruit I'd ever seen and we still made great wine. No black magic, just keeping it simple and doing the right things at the right time. Burgundy is also wonderful for the people — for the community of those living and working there. Sooner or later everyone passes through, and you get to know them. That's the greatest thing.

— Wasenhaus has always felt to me like a marker of the new German wave — one that you helped set in motion. There's been a generational shift even at some of the major German domaines, and the energy around it is remarkable, at least from where I'm standing. How do you perceive the situation in German winemaking from the inside? Not in general terms — we could find things to improve everywhere in the world — but specifically this growing momentum around low-intervention, terroir-driven wines. You triggered an avalanche, you know that?

This change is a really great thing. Germany is all about technology and industrialisation, and we made wines in a similar way — terrible. That's where you can really learn from the French: that none of this is necessary and you can still do a great job. And there were already a few others before us — like [Rudi] Trossen and Enderle & Moll — they deserve the credit for doing something that 99.9999% of the wine-loving community in Germany had never even heard of before. We just happened to be there at the right time, it was never planned. Accidentally, what we love to do turned out to be what was maybe needed in Germany to open some eyes. Still, it's just a few people doing it now, given the diversity of the German wine landscape and the potential of great terroir — but yes, we're getting there.

— German Spätburgunder is having a real moment on the world stage. The quality has been there for some time — thanks to the great limestone terroirs and consistent work — but when do you think the world actually started to notice?

Honestly, I can't really pinpoint it. There are multiple factors at play. First, as you mentioned, there was a real mindset shift in German winemaking over the last decade — not just in the low-intervention sector, but even among the big names like Huber, Keller, and others.

Before, everyone said they were making wine like in Burgundy, but either no one really knew how it was done there, or they thought they could do it even better with some magic powders — and we all know that doesn't make things better. Now the younger generation is travelling more, listening more, and that shows in the quality.

Second, Burgundy has become pricewise out of reach for most wine lovers — the great crus simply aren't affordable anymore. Slowly people started to look around and realise: oh, there's Germany, growing Pinot Noir for at least a thousand years, on limestone, and at prices you can still afford. Most of our importers also work with Burgundy, and for them we're a serious alternative — not cheap, but still within reach.

— Every region has an approach that gets handed down from generation to generation, or simply adopted because that's how it's always been done. Is there anything fundamental that you changed in cultivation and winemaking when you came back from Burgundy? Something that isn't common in the German approach?

As I mentioned before, Germans love industrialisation — we love building cars, and that's essentially how we farm vineyards and make wine too. For every problem there's a technical solution: here's a new Fendt [tractor], it can do even more and faster, job done. That's not our philosophy. We want to keep things simple and low-tech — if machines make some things easier or safer, great, but not just for the sake of it. What's better done by hand is done by hand. Most of our machines are old, there's nothing fancy in the vineyards or in the cellar, and honestly that's totally fine by me. When we started, we were quite alone in that approach in Germany.

The same goes for how we cultivate the vines — you need to do a good job, but it doesn't have to be obsessive. Good timing is essential, and beyond that, it really doesn't take much to keep the vines happy. Most people in Germany always want to do more — make it cleaner, more efficient. I think we just don't share that instinct.

– And on the other hand, is there something sacred that you wouldn’t touch, is purely German and gives the whole thing even more originality?

Honestly, nothing about German viticulture or winemaking feels sacred to us. We just want to keep things simple — and we don't pull out old vines just because we think French selection massale Pinot Noir would do better. Maybe it would, but you'd be waiting forty years after planting to find out. So the old German clones, with all their quirks, do a good job when they're old. For Pinot we really like small French oak barrels — mainly used ones — but for whites we're appreciating more and more the classic German Fuder barrels. Large-volume vessels really make sense here.

— I'm asking because it's not uncommon for people to use shortcuts and project some external standard of quality onto something that should have its own originality. I'm thinking of a term like "Burgundy from Baden" — which is nonsense. How do you think a producer should preserve their own originality and translate it into wine?

Yes, obviously those comparisons are nonsense. We make wine in the place and time we're in — and that's the 21st century in Baden. I guess people always need to categorise things; they can't let something exist on its own terms without giving it a category. And that's fine, I understand it — but I see this phrase slapped on every Pinot that someone wants to sell as serious wine, and most of the time it's just a disguise for not-quite-Burgundy. Christoph and I have never worked in a German wine cellar, so everything we know comes from Tuscany or Burgundy. Of course we apply here what we learned working with Pinot and Chardonnay back in Burgundy — but we're not living and working in Burgundy anymore. Baden is different, and Spätburgunder is different from Pinot Noir in Burgundy. That's why we keep Spätburgunder on our labels and not Pinot. Our wine can't be like Burgundy — it simply can't. That said, it's an honour to sometimes see our wines alongside great Burgundy and watch them hold their own.

— You work on limestone and volcanic terroirs — how would you characterise wines from these geologically different soils? Baden is a broad term, and I'd love for you to go deeper into the different conditions in Ehrenstetten, Kirchhofen, Ebringen and the Kaiserstuhl area.

The great majority of our vineyards are on limestone clay soils in the Markgräflerland, with a few at the Kaiserstuhl on volcanic rock — in a place that was once an ancient volcano. We also buy some grapes, grown mainly on loess soils in either the Markgräflerland or the Kaiserstuhl. So those are the three main soil types we work with.

Loess is the most straightforward. The vineyards are relatively flat or on broad terraces — it's a fine dust left by glaciers grinding down rock during the ice ages, which accumulated in thick layers at the foot of the Black Forest and around the Kaiserstuhl. That's what connects all the Baden subregions. The soil is deep, stores nutrients and water almost perfectly for any plant, and produces wines that reflect that ease — fruity, floral, approachable. Ideal for entry-level wines.

The pre-hills of the Black Forest in the Markgräflerland are mostly limestone — usually a sandy, yellowish type, though in some parts you find Jurassic limestone and marl. These soils are clay-rich, sometimes a little sandy, sometimes very heavy clay, occasionally red from iron. This is the classic home of Pinot and Chardonnay. On these soils, you make the most complex wines from these varieties — you get that chalky bite that gives them tension and depth.

The Kaiserstuhl sits between the Black Forest and the Vosges, right along the Rhine — an ancient volcanic mountain range. Much of it is covered by loess, but in some parts the volcanic rock breaks through to the surface, and as it weathers it leaves a rocky, dark grey, sandy soil that looks almost like ash. There's no clay — it's purely sandy. The Kaiserstuhl is the warmest and driest region in Germany, and for the vines it's a real struggle in drought years. The soil doesn't hold water well, but the volcanic rock — not basalt — is very porous, so the roots can still find moisture. The wines that come from there tend to be riper, with slightly darker fruit, and the tannins are very fine-grained — much like the soil itself. Surprisingly, these wines are approachable even when young, due to their expressive fruit and the fine grain of the tannins, while still ageing well. Pinots from the Kaiserstuhl are less angular than those from limestone, but they have real concentration and depth — and you can open them without hesitation.

For us it's clear that the most complex Pinots and Chardonnays come from limestone — it's simply the natural home of those varieties. But seeing them grow on volcanic soil is a fascinating expression in its own right, and we love that subregion for its own beauty.

— Are you deliberately looking for old vineyards on steep slopes?

We aren't necessarily looking for steep slopes — they're hard to work! [laughs] But the less steep they are, the more loess you have in the soil. So if we want to see the limestone, which we do, that unfortunately means you have to go higher up the hill.

— What is the Pinot Noir genetic material like here? I'd assume there are old massal selections, but maybe I'm wrong.

Historically, the Markgräflerland — and actually Baden as a whole — was a white wine region. Without global warming, getting ripe fruit was hard enough that it simply made more sense to grow white varieties. Pinot has been grown here since the 10th century, but just here and there, almost as a curiosity. The real shift towards Pinot Noir in Baden came much later, from the 1970s and 80s onwards — and it came hand in hand with an industrial approach to the vineyards, where producers ripped everything out and flattened entire hillsides to make them easier to work.

So unfortunately, almost no pre-clonal plant material survives in Baden. Truly old vines from before the clonal era are extremely rare, and 99% of those that remain are white varieties. That means there are no Pinot vines we can say with certainty aren't clonal selections — only the typical Baden clones used for plantings from the 1970s onward.

– Was that when the mass planting of lockerbeerige clones began? How present are these loose-bunched vines in Baden now?

In the beginning, people only used clones with compact bunches, quite big and high-yielding, though. If you can get these ripe without getting too much rot, they're actually not bad – but they do always get a lot of it. And they also don't ripen at the same time. The lockerbeerige clones [Lockerbeerige — literally "loose-berried" — are German-bred Spätburgunder clones with an open, airy bunch structure that makes them more resistant to botrytis. They tend to produce fruitier, more acidic wines than the compact French Dijon clones.] came later, and most of them are really bad. The newer ones are actually pretty okay, but you can't use them for whole-cluster fermentations at all.

– Do you personally work with the lockerbeerige, or have you resorted to grafting in some vineyards?

90% of the Pinots we're working with are the clones typical for our region and the time they have been planted. As I mentioned before, we rarely rip vineyards out, as we love old vines and nothing we plant today will achieve the depth of those wines we're making from the older vines now, within the span of our potential active career. Even if the clones are shit. You can plant a fantastic selection massale from Burgundy, but for the first 20 years at least, it will be only young vines and so will be the wine. We do plant a new vineyard from time to time — sometimes we take over plots that are fantastic but there's nothing to save anymore, or it was planted with Regent [German hybrid grape variety, widely planted across Germany from the late 1990s onward due to its strong resistance to fungal diseases. E.N.]. In such cases, we replant with diverse Burgundy selection massales. We would love to have a real Spätburgunder massale selection, but it doesn't really exist and we don't have vines old enough to be sure they're not clonal – so unfortunately, there is only Burgundy left for getting that material.

– How do you work in the vineyard?

We work organically, with a biodynamic approach, but we're not the biggest maniacs and geeks about biodynamics either. Good artisanal work, avoiding complex chemical treatments and trying to leave the soil intact. In the end, it's agriculture — you cultivate soil and plants. That means you've got to work on them, but we're pretty low-tech and relaxed about it. We don't use any fertiliser; only if we see the vines getting really weak do we put some compost or horse manure from the Wasenhaus horses in the vineyards — but that's quite rare. Most of the time it's just not necessary. Quite the opposite, actually — we have to fight the vigour and productivity those German clones have anyway, so you don't really want to fatten them up with extra food.

The vineyards are most of the time under a natural cover crop; sometimes we sow something extra in, but most of the time it's just natural herbs growing. From time to time we plough a couple of rows in spring in some vineyards, but we're careful with that — trying to get balanced fruit in drought years following years where the rain never stops is a real challenge. Our biggest issues these days are either sunburn or sour rot due to Drosophila suzukii, particularly for the reds. We don't have an answer for them yet.

– Have you had moments when you felt a real change in the balance of the vineyard, and therefore in the wine, because you changed your approach, applied a different procedure, or changed your perspective on cultivation?

Vines are slow — there's no rapid change you can see or taste quickly, it all takes decades. Most of our vineyards are old vines that got treated like shit before, pushed towards mass production for the cooperatives. It's always interesting to see how they change over a couple of years, finding new strength and balance — but it always takes years before you slowly start to see the resulting wine become more complex, saltier. For us, the interesting part is that it doesn't take much to make the vines happy. Just a few good jobs during the year and they'll do their job. Nothing super fancy needed.

– Finesse, precision and refined uniqueness — these are the words that come to mind when I taste your wines. Where do you think they come from? Besides the vineyard, of course, as terroir is indisputable — where is the fine grain of the wine actually created? Is there a detail that's easy to neglect or overlook, but that actually separates the good from the excellent?

Our wines show what Baden is when you don't manipulate too much. I mean — winemaking is making, it's in the name. If you don't step in at all, the result will be rot and vinegar, not wine. We always want to make wine — we actually want to drink ourselves too. We're lucky we didn't need to fulfill any tradition or expectations, as we started everything from scratch, so we could just make wine in a way we saw fit to get the results we wanted.

More or less every great wine in the world is made in a certain low-tech way — except for Mosel Kabinetts, maybe. It all depends on your definition of low-tech, of course. You don't need much to make it — in the best case, nothing but grapes, in an ideal world. But the world is not ideal. It's all about watching, tasting and making decisions — sometimes you just let it go and everything is fine, and sometimes it needs a little sulphur to help the wine stay on track and come out fine and elegant.

The great Burgundy wines have been great for so long because the Burgundians are very stubborn. They didn't welcome modern oenology, clones, fancy machines — so the farming and winemaking, at least for the top producers, stayed pretty basic. No commercial yeasts, sometimes a bit of sugar [added before fermentation], more or less SO2; if everything is going to shit, then maybe some tartaric acid, sometimes a filtration — or not — and that's pretty much it for a classical Burgundy. In my book, that's pretty low-tech and low-intervention, especially compared to classic German winemaking.

For us, we want to simplify even further — but some sulphur here and there is not bad, to keep things on track. No huge amounts necessary, but it does the job when used at the right moment. In the end, it's about tasting the wine constantly and reflecting on the impact of your decisions in the final wine, then adapting to get closer to the wine you want to make. That means you need to have an ideal wine in mind to work towards. There are many screws to turn — from planting a vineyard, to farming it, to making the wine from it. That's what we love: slowly turning those screws one way or the other to see what happens.

– I'm always curious about the evolution of a winemaker's taste and opinions — the adaptation and inspiration process. How has it been for you over the past 10 years? What were you wrong about, or had to reconsider, and what on the contrary works unwaveringly in every era?

Our pHs are not great overall, and that goes for the whole region. Realising that has been a big bummer, and until now there's not much we can do to get fruit with better pHs. But a good pH is really the base of a great low-intervention / natural wine — it just makes everything easier and allows the wine to evolve in a better direction. So that's a significant difference between Burgundy and Baden. We don't really know yet what the solution is for us. On one hand we want to stay as natural as possible, but on the other hand we've had to accept that it may not really be possible for our region and the style of wine we want to make and stand for.

We always had in mind to make 100% whole-cluster red wines, but we had to realise that with the clones and kinds of Pinot we have here, it's not really possible. So we did many experiments — which parts go in whole-cluster and which are better destemmed — and I think that's something we've really dialled in quite well over the last years.

– Besides the pH, what's your next big challenge or project?

Our biggest challenge is, and will be, the construction of our own cellar. We've rented a cellar so far, but sooner or later we have to move out and we can't find another one to rent that works for us. It's kind of the toughest decision — an investment we have to make in an environment of one global crisis after another and a declining consumption of wine. Time will tell.

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