Anyone who buys a bottle today with the eagle and grapes on its capsule gets a pyramid thrown in. At the bottom is the Gutswein, or estate wine; above it the Ortswein, or village wine; then the Erste Lage; and at the very top the Große Lage – the VDP’s equivalents of premier cru and grand cru. The principle is simple: the narrower the origin, the higher the ambition. Self-evident as that sounds today, the road to it was a long one. And it begins not in the vineyards but at auctions.
1910: the natural-wine auctioneers
On 26 November 1910, in Koblenz, four regional associations joined forces as the Verband Deutscher Naturweinversteigerer, or VDNV – the Association of German Natural Wine Auctioneers. That is the date given by the association’s brochure, the VDP’s auction chronicle and the Tagesspiegel; the VDP’s online timeline gives 27 November. They came from the Rheingau, Rheinhessen, the Pfalz and the Mosel. The first chairman was Albert von Bruchhausen, the Lord Mayor of Trier. The members sold their best wines at auction, and they committed themselves to a principle that was by no means a given at the time: Naturwein, meaning wine without added sugar.
In the mid-1920s came the emblem that has remained to this day: a stylised eagle bearing grapes. According to the association’s brochure, it was to vouch „für Naturreinheit, Güte und Bekömmlichkeit des Flascheninhalts“ (our translation: “for the natural purity, quality and wholesomeness of the bottle’s contents”). Difficult decades followed, with economic crisis, enforced political alignment under National Socialism, war, and a post-war market in which the sale of bottled wine gradually displaced the auctions.
1971: the law that reordered the vineyards
The deepest rupture came through legislation. In its chronicle the VDP dates the reform to “1969/71”; the decisive statute was the Wine Law of 14 July 1971. For the natural-wine auctioneers it had two unwelcome consequences.
First, it banned the term Naturwein. The association had to reinvent itself. By its own account, in 1971 it was on the verge of dissolution until Peter von Weymarn of the Heyl zu Herrnsheim estate in Nierstein talked the remaining members round. There followed a new seat, new statutes and a new name – Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter, the VDP, Germany’s association of top estates – with von Weymarn as president. The VDP and the Tagesspiegel place the renaming in 1971; Wikipedia mentions Verband Deutscher Prädikatswein-Versteigerer as an intermediate name and dates the new statutes to 1972.
Second, the law put the question of quality on a new footing. The yardstick was now must weight – that is, the ripeness of the grapes – rather than origin. A Spätlese (literally “late harvest”, one of the Prädikat ripeness levels) from a mediocre slope stood legally alongside a Spätlese from a famous vineyard. At the same time the vineyard sites were reorganised. A multitude of small, often barely known field names became around 2,600 registered Einzellagen, or single vineyard sites. Over these were laid some 170 Großlagen, collective sites that group several Einzellagen together and are often barely distinguishable from a single site on the label. Critics complain to this day that weaker land ended up under the names of famous neighbouring sites. For the idea of a grand cru, this was about as helpful as a watering can for precision work.
The counter-movement
The association’s first response was to set its own rules. In 1982 the members laid down binding standards that went beyond the law, including higher minimum must weights, and made the eagle compulsory on all bottles.
In parallel, an initiative of its own emerged in the Rheingau. In 1984 Erwein Graf Matuschka-Greiffenclau, Hans Ambrosi, Bernhard and Heinrich Breuer and the Geisenheim professor Helmut Becker founded the Charta association. Its aim was a dry to off-dry, age-worthy Rheingau Riesling from fully ripe grapes from the best sites, assessed in a blind tasting. Charta is today regarded as an important forerunner of the later site classification. In 1999 it was absorbed into the VDP Rheingau.
At national level, a decision of principle was taken in 1994. The members gave up Großlage names on their labels and resolved to develop their own classification of German vineyards. Among the foundations were historical site maps from the 19th century, such as Prussian tax maps, which already distinguished the vineyards by quality. In other words, the answer was sought in precisely the tradition that the 1971 law had pushed aside.
2002: the first statute and the Großes Gewächs
In 2002 the members adopted a classification statute. That same year saw the introduction of the Großes Gewächs, the designation for top dry wines from the best sites. At that stage the highest site tier was still called Erste Lage. The system was a compromise between Burgundian thinking about sites and the German Prädikat tradition, and it was not altogether easy for outsiders to see through.
2012: the four-tier pyramid
On 25 January 2012 an extraordinary general meeting in Neustadt an der Weinstraße unanimously adopted the new classification, effective from the 2012 vintage. The VDP set a transition period until 2015. The former top tier, Erste Lage, was now called Große Lage. Beneath it, a new Erste Lage was inserted, modelled on grand cru and premier cru in Burgundy.
This is how today’s pyramid came about. The Gutswein is the house’s calling card. The Ortswein comes from good sites within a single village. The Erste Lage stands for a classified single site, the Große Lage for the pinnacle, delimited plot by plot. The VDP gives maximum yields of 75 hectolitres per hectare for Gutswein and Ortswein, 60 for Erste Lage and 50 for Große Lage, together with selective hand-picking. Dry wines from Große Lagen bear the designation Großes Gewächs (GG), recognisable on the bottle by the embossed GG. Within the site tiers, the classic Prädikat levels such as Spätlese or Auslese are reserved for fruity-sweet and nobly sweet wines.
From association term to law
For a long time the Großes Gewächs was primarily a brand of the association. That changed in 2021. In March of that year the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German parliament, confirmed the terms Großes Gewächs and Erstes Gewächs in the new Wine Regulation. According to an announcement by the Rheingau winegrowers’ association at the time, both must be vinified dry. The Großes Gewächs additionally requires hand-picking and a maximum yield of 50 hectolitres per hectare, the Erstes Gewächs selective harvesting and a maximum of 60 hectolitres. Fifty years after the Wine Law of 1971, origin has thus regained a little legal ground beneath its feet.
Even so, the pyramid is not finished. In 2023 the trade journal Weinwirtschaft reported on regional variations, such as an additional capsule in Rheinhessen that in effect creates a fifth tier. This shows how much life there is in the system – and how difficult it remains to read German wine labels without an instruction leaflet. Around 200 estates belong to the VDP today. The natural-wine auctioneers of 1910 have become an association that preaches terroir. Its eagle has come through the transformation remarkably well.
