Noble Rot in the Rheingau: The Rise and Fall of a Winegrowing Legacy – A Guest Post by Kevin D. Goldberg, Ph.D.

Hello readers!  I am currently on my maternity leave spending some quality time with my family! Enjoy this guest post from today’s featured author, Kevin D. Goldberg, Ph.D.

Kevin D. Goldberg (Ph.D.) is Dean of the Social Sciences at the Weber School in Atlanta, GA. He has written several articles and book chapters on German wine and is the translator of Weinatlas Deutschland / Wine Atlas of Germany (University of California Press, 2014).


Eltville, situated on the Rhine River about 45 kilometers west of Frankfurt, is a microcosm of old Europe. The nooks, crannies, bends, and cobbles of its quaint historic core are the tangible residue of those three most powerful institutions that dominated life in the Rheingau for a thousand years; the Catholic Church, the Prince-Bishop of Mainz, and the winegrowing nobility. Not unlike Diocletian’s Palace in Split, Croatia, Eltville’s streets were once passageways between and within the town’s imposing structures, including the estates of von Eltz and Langwerth von Simmern, both former holders of prime vineyards in the Rheingau.

Legends abound in the Rheingau. It was here, at Schloss Johannisberg, that the wondrous sweetness of Spätlese was “accidentally” discovered because of a delayed harvest decree (Johnson, 291-292). The Rheingau village of Hochheim is said to be the source of that once-ubiquitous yet horrific-sounding shorthand, “Hock,” bestowed by Queen Victoria upon her favorite wines. One need not search far and wide to find the Rheingau’s imprint on many of the most luminary figures of the 18th and 19th centuries; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Benjamin Disraeli, and Thomas Jefferson are only a few of those who were enchanted by its offerings.

But as Timothy Blanning has pointed out, in spite of the Rheingau being one of “the wealthiest strips of land in [eighteenth century] Europe,” and its wines “the best and most expensive in Germany,” the self-interest of the nobility, as well as the region’s overpopulation, meant that this was also one of the poorest territories within the Electorate of Mainz (Blanning, 94). As the English traveler J.K. Risbeck noted in the late eighteenth century, “it is a great misfortune for this country that, though restrained by law, the nobility are, through connivance of the elector, allowed to purchase as much land as they please” (Blanning, 94).

Some Rheingau myths manifested themselves in reality. Around 1900, a small parcel of the famed Erbacher Marcobrunn vineyard sold for the equivalent of 160,000 Marks per hectare, a sum so enormous that the contemporary historian Karl Lamprecht called it “about as expensive as a piece of the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin” (Lamprecht, 178). The nineteenth-century folklorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl also discovered something unique about the Rheingau. There was, according to Riehl, no middle class. Instead, Riehl found only the most egregious poverty and the most ostentatious wealth, no doubt a reference to the region’s dominant noble families (Riehl, 147-148).

Once considered by historians as decaying and anti-modern at worst, or succumbing to middle-class tastes at best, German nobility in the period before WWI were hardly powerless in determining their fates. Given the multitude of political changes that accompanied the transition of the Rheingau nobility into the modern period, including the collapse of the archbishopric of Mainz in 1803, the weakness of the subsequent Duchy of Nassau, the region’s incorporation into the Prussian district of Wiesbaden in 1866, and the strengthening of  non-noble players in the wine trade in the final third of the nineteenth century, the survival of the Rheingau nobility into the twentieth century seems at first glance nothing less than providential. Upon closer examination, however, widespread mentalities and behaviorsamong the noble class, including their caste-like neighborliness, strategic marriages, and economic corporatism, proved extremely useful in combination with their willingness to adopt modern selling strategies.

By 1900, the Rheingau nobility, including the Langwerth von Simmern family in Eltville, had recognized that winegrowing was a fundamental part of their survival, and that selling wine had largely replaced service to the state and church as their raison d’être. Whereas other crops, including wheat, corn, and fruits presented little opportunity for competitive advantage (in fact, nobility were usually at a disadvantage in these forms of agriculture, which required considerable commercial economies of scale), winegrowing—with its connections to elite-focused branding, massive price variation, and relative scarcity—was tailor-made for the aristocratic, luxury-focused nobility.

The strategic survival of the Rheingau nobility shaped the global perception of German wine, even after World War II. Even as late as 1984, the New York Times could confidently point out that the Rheingau was still the greatest source of Riesling in Germany. The Times author suggested to readers that they locate bottles from the region’s traditional noble families, including Eltz, Langwerth von Simmern, and Metternich-Schloss Johannisberg (Prial).

Why then, in 2018, with global interest in German wine at a post-WWII high, has the Rheingau’s winegrowing nobility, including the families Eltz, Langwerth von Simmern, and Metternich, all but disappeared?

The nobility didn’t exit quietly. “Der Spiegel” reported on the familial infighting at Schloss Vollrads in 1985, then in the hands of the Matuschka-Greiffenclau family, with an article titled “Dallas in the Rheingau” (“Dallas”). Greiffenclau ancestors occupied the Elector’s seat in Mainz and Trier as well as the Prince-Bishop’s seat in Würzburg. A decade after the article appeared, the drama at Vollrads, like on Dallas, ended with a “bang.” Erwein Matuschka-Greiffenclau, the 29th generation at the helm, a day after he declared bankruptcy at the formidable estate in August 1997, took his own life among his vines with a pistol. Vollrads, where the diminished quality of its wines has not gone unnoticed by critics, remains in the hands of the Nassau Savings Bank.

A crisis of succession played no small part in the transition of the stately Schloss Johannisberg into corporate hands. The Holy Roman Emperor Francis II gifted the property, including its vines, to Prince Klemens von Metternich for his service at the Congress of Vienna. By the time that Tatiana Metternich died in 2006, without heirs, the entire estate had been owned by the food conglomerate Dr. Oetker. The Oetker family had decades earlier purchased the Wiesbaden-based Henkell & Söhnlein Sektkelleri, which included its top-selling Fürst von Metternich sparkling wine brand, sourced with grapes from Metternich’s vines.

Earlier this year, Langwerth von Simmern sold off their vine-holdings to Rheingau vintner Mattias Corvers, and their physical estate in Eltville to a property-development firm with no connection to winemaking (Bock). The Langwerth von Simmern family, ensconced in the Rheingau since the 15th century and owners of prime parcels in the famed Erbacher Marcobrunn vineyard mentioned above, will, it is reported, resettle at their Knight’s Estate in Hannover-Wichtringhausen. Motivation for the sale is still unclear, but warning signs of the family’s imminent departure from winegrowing, including inattentive vineyard management and declining interest among consumers, have been mounting for years.

Having survived the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, Napoleonic mediatization, and the literal implosion of the trade during the Second World War, the Rheingau nobility’s withdrawal from winegrowing amidst the relative buoyancy of recent decades is surprising. Wine connoisseurs no longer speak of Rheingau wine in a quasi-mythological way. In its place, selections from the Mosel, Nahe, and Rheinhessen have found space in collectors’ cellars. The Erbacher Marcobrunn vineyard, once widely acknowledged to be of the highest quality, is now often castigated as mediocre or past its prime due global warming. Perhaps the vineyard’s battered reputation can be blamed on the rash of noble rot in the Rheingau?

But in Eltville, a stone’s throw from Marcobrunn’s discounted vines, in the shadows of its princely tower and noble turrets, the spectre of old Europe still haunts, waiting patiently to be bottled. 

REFERENCES

Blanning, T.C.W. (1974). Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743-1803. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Bock. O. “Bewegung im Rheingauer Weinbau.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 29 August 2018: Web. 17 January 2019.

“Dallas im Rheingau.” (1985). Der Spiegel 20 February 1995: Web. 17 January 2019.

Johnson, H. (1989). Vintage: The Story of Wine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Lamprecht, K. (1912). Deutsche Geschichte der jüngsten Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Vol. 1. Berlin, Germany: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.

Langwerth von Simmern, H. (1909). Familiengeschichte der Freiherren Langwerth von Simmern. Hannover, Germany.

Prial, F.J. (1985). “Wine; German Precision.” The New York Times 3 June 1984: Web. 17 January 2019.

Riehl, W.H. (1854). Die Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Social-Politik. Erste Band, Land und Leute. Stuttgart and Tübingen: J.G. Cotta’scher Verlag.

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