Wasenhaus

Wasenhaus is a German estate that came back from Burgundy. Christoph Wolber and Alexander Götze are two Germans who met in Beaune as oenology students and worked across some of Burgundy's most respected domaines - Comte Armand, Leflaive, de Montille (where Alex spent nearly a decade as chef de culture, until 2021), Pierre Morey, Bernard van Berg, and Domaine de la Vougeraie. They bonded over what they call "the Burgundy bug," and in 2016 came home to Baden to start their own project. Christoph grew up on a horse farm outside Staufen; the estate is named after it.

The idea is simple, and it's closer to Burgundy's parcel-first logic than to Germany's usual site-and-Prädikat frame. Instead of chasing Riesling or the big Kaiserstuhl volcanic sites, Wolber and Götze look for parcels that other growers don't want - neglected, hard-to-work, low-yielding - often in tiny quantities, often rented rather than owned. They started in the far-southern Markgräflerland, in the Ehrenstetten Öhlberg vineyard near Staufen, and expanded out from there. Pinot Noir (Spätburgunder) is the backbone; Chardonnay and Weissburgunder round out the whites, with a nod to Baden's native Gutedel (Chasselas).

The winemaking is meticulous rather than zero-zero natural. Native yeasts, varying stem inclusion on the reds (anywhere from none to fully whole-cluster) in open-top vats, long aging in old oak, judicious sulphur after malolactic. Low intervention with Burgundy-trained hands on the wheel.

The cuvées are site names:

• Bellen - the flagship Pinot Noir, a small plot within the Öhlberg
• Filzen, Kanzel, Möhlin, Hohlen, Am Kreuz, Kalk - other parcels across Markgräflerland
• Vulkan - from the Kaiserstuhl volcanic hillside

The Pinots get compared to village-level Côte d'Or - a claim that's been made about German Spätburgunder before and usually doesn't hold, but here it lands often enough to matter. Alongside a small group of Baden growers working in a similar register, Wasenhaus has been part of shifting how the region reads outside of Riesling.