Some stories are so good that one is reluctant to check them. The tale of the Spätlesereiter – the “late-harvest rider” – is one of them. A messenger rides from the Rheingau to Fulda to fetch permission for the harvest and returns far too late. By then the grapes on the Johannisberg have succumbed to rot; they are picked anyway, and the result is a wine unlike anything anyone has tasted before. So much for the legend. The pleasing thing about this case is that part of it can actually be documented, and the rest is easy to recognise as legend.
A vineyard owned by Fulda
To understand why a Rheingau estate had to wait for post from eastern Hesse, one has to go back several decades. In 1716 Konstantin von Buttlar, the Prince-Abbot of Fulda, bought the former monastery on the Johannisberg and had the present-day Schloss built in its place. The vineyards were substantially enlarged and replanted. According to the literature, some 294,000 vines were planted in 1720 and 1721 – all of them Riesling. This is why Schloss Johannisberg likes to call itself the world’s first contiguous Riesling vineyard.
Ownership had a consequence that proved decisive for the story. The lord of the Johannisberg resided in Fulda, a good distance to the east, and no picking could begin without his consent. So, at least according to tradition, every autumn a courier rode to Fulda with grape samples and returned with permission to harvest. The city of Fulda, however, points out in its own account that the records nowhere mention such permission being sought.
Autumn 1775: the messenger fails to return
In the autumn of 1775 the ruler was Heinrich VIII von Bibra, Prince-Bishop of Fulda. The courier set off as usual, but this time it took a while. Exactly how long is a matter of dispute. Most accounts, including the Rheingau’s own wine promotion body and a report by the Catholic news agency KNA marking the 250th anniversary, speak of about 14 days. The German Wikipedia article on Schloss Johannisberg gives eight days, the one on the Spätlesereiter several weeks, and the city of Fulda “14 days or even four weeks”. The wine magazine STIPvisiten, for its part, gives eight days as the usual length of the round trip, which it says was clearly exceeded in 1775. There is no reliable figure. Evidently even the delay has come down to us with a certain lack of punctuality.
The question of why the rider took so long is more colourful still. The options on offer include a prince-bishop out hunting, robbers by the roadside, a beautiful woman, illness, storms, idleness or simply too much wine along the way. None of it is documented. Nor, as Wikipedia soberly notes, is the rider himself historically attested; it treats him as a figure of local legend. We know neither his name, nor his horse, nor his excuse.
What the records actually say
Better documented is what happened in the cellar. By the time picking finally began, the Johannisberg grapes had been attacked by noble rot – the fungus Botrytis cinerea, which shrivels the berries and concentrates both sugar and acidity. They were picked and pressed regardless.
The man responsible was Johann Michael Engert, who was in charge of the wine on the Johannisberg. His notes from the spring of 1776 are the real source of the story. On 26 February 1776, according to KNA, he recorded that the young wine was still cloudy and had a certain sweetness, but that he hoped for „etwas außerordentliches der Güte halber“ (our translation: “something extraordinary in terms of quality”). By 10 April 1776 hope had turned to enthusiasm. Engert wrote, in essence, that he had never before put such a wine to his lips. According to the KNA report, the vintage turned out so well that prices for older vintages fell noticeably. The town of Geisenheim also points out that Josef Staab, for many years the estate’s administrator, and his predecessor Christian Labonte made the story verifiable by citing the sources.
It can therefore be summed up like this: the late harvest of 1775 and its outcome are documented through Engert’s notes. The rider, his delay and the reasons for it belong to legend – and thoroughly entertaining legend at that.
Discovered or rediscovered?
The Johannisberg stroke of luck was not quite as unique as the legend suggests, however. According to the city of Fulda, late-harvest wines are attested as early as the 17th century, in Bordeaux or Tokaj for instance. The Fulda account therefore deliberately speaks of the rediscovery of Spätlese (literally “late harvest”). The Johannisberg’s achievement lies rather in having taken the experience seriously and turned it into practice: late, selective picking became a tool for quality. From this, Auslese, Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese later developed as well.
Over time, chance became a concept and ultimately a legal category. With the Wine Law of 1971, Spätlese became one of the levels of Qualitätswein mit Prädikat in Germany, defined by the must weight of the grapes. Today that no longer automatically means noble rot or sweetness. A Spätlese can be made dry, and many are. The link to 1775 is therefore one of idea rather than taste: whoever waits longer can harvest riper grapes.
Two monuments to an unknown man
That a man whose name nobody knows should have not one but two monuments is a charming twist. A statue of the Spätlesereiter has stood in the courtyard of Schloss Johannisberg for decades. Wikipedia and the city of Fulda both date it to 1960; Fulda describes it as a clay sculpture.
Fulda followed suit later. In August 2020 the city council decided to place a Spätlesereiter in the palace courtyard as well. In an anonymised competition the jury voted unanimously for the design by the Berlin sculptor Valerie Otte, and in September 2021 the almost life-size bronze was unveiled in the inner courtyard of Fulda’s Stadtschloss. The location is well chosen: in the 18th century the cellars beneath the palace held the wines from Fulda’s Rheingau possessions. There the rider holds his horse by the reins, at eye level with visitors, as if this time he were in no hurry.
And today?
Schloss Johannisberg remains a pure Riesling estate of around 50 hectares. The Metternich name has been associated with the house since 1816. Today the estate is owned by the sparkling wine producer Henkell & Co., which trades as Henkell Freixenet and belongs to the Oetker Group. Its Spätlese traditionally carries a green seal, the Grünlack Spätlese. Anyone drinking it may well spare a brief thought for a messenger of whom we know nothing except one thing: that he was late. Rarely has unpunctuality paid off so handsomely.