Growing Gold on Vines

For German wine growers, this year's long mellow autumn provided a truly golden opportunity--plenty of time to harvest the grapes for what is probably the world's most expensive wine, called Trockenbeerenauslese. (The name, pronounced Trawken-barren-aus-lay-zuh, means "pick of the dried grapes"). Connoisseurs prize the rare white wine's flower-sweet bouquet and smoothness; its bite is in the price tag. Depending on the estate and vintage, a 23 1/2-oz. bottle of Trockenbeerenauslese retails in the U.S. for no less than $20, and can cost as much as $150. It is far costlier than France's better-known Chateau La-fite-Rothschild or Romanee-Conti.

Last week, as workers stored the harvest for the start of a two-year fermentation, the German Wine Growers Association judged this year's Trockenbeerenauslese "good, but not outstanding." Still, that was the best since 1964. To produce even tiny amounts of the wine takes abundant luck and labor. The grower leaves some grapes on the vine beyond the regular September harvest, gambling that the weather will remain mild and sunny so that a few of them will shrivel and grow a two-millimeter coat of gray fungus. This Edelfdule, or "noble rot," draws off moisture from the grapes, leaving a fine sweetness. Since the mold grows on only some of the grapes, a picker has to select them, one by one, from a bunch. It takes a skilled picker no fewer than six hours to find and pluck the three to four kilos of raisinlike grapes that go into a single bottle. Estates do not make much money from their Trockenbeerenauslese, but its production gives them a quality image that enables them to charge higher prices for their other wines.

The amount produced by the 50 or so estates that bottle the wine is always small. The crop of Vintner Giinther Schlink of Bad Kreuznach will yield 150,000 bottles this year, for example, but only 350 will be Trockenbeerenauslese. The major U.S. importer of the wines, Manhattan's Austin, Nichols & Co., will supply only 600 bottles this year to about 25 distributors and special customers, primarily in New York and Boston--many of them attracted as much by the wine's scarcity as by its quality.

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