Germany's best vineyards mapped

29 January 2018

 

Last week the German VDP's new online map site VDP.Vineyard.Online finally went live. The site is the accumulation of three years of thorough research and cartography which goes beyond an accumulation of intelligent maps.

VDP stands for Verband deutscher Prädikatsweingüter or The Association of German Prädikat Wine Estates. As the German wine laws have not facilitated a clear distinction of quality between winemakers, areas, and vineyards, as in, for instance, France, the VDP have attempted to remidy this by developing an internal vineyard classification. The association consist of 200 vintners who expressively commit themselves to quality and 'terroir-driven viticulture at the highest level'. Doing so, they classify their vineyards in a similar fashion to the Bourgogne system of Grand Cru, Premire Cru and so forth. In the VDP system the vineyards are identified as the superior Grosse Lage, the 'first class' Erste Lage, the Superior Ortsweine, and the overall good Gutsweine. As a cutting-edge innovative way of navigating, quite literally, in the German VDP landscape, they have spend years developing a fantastic tool for wine lovers to find the best VDP vineyards in Germany.

The interactive map puts each one of the 771 classified vineyards into setting, from area to town to particular bundle of land, and it gives point by point data on the important terroir characteristics, such as the steepness, rise, angle, soil structure and atmosphere related to any particular site. It takes a couple of minutes to discover your way around, but the maps are zoomable down to very good detail. 

You can also discover which VDP winemakers cultivate which areas, the historical backdrop of the vineyard, showed by photographs and additionally maps.

You can find it all here: http://www.vdp.de/en/vineyardonline/

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