Häusleboden GG is Heger’s finest wine. It is made from 100% Spätburgunder from a tiny plot of only 0.28ha in Winklerberg with particularly good exposure called Häusleboden. Here the canes are more than 60 years old and they all started their lives as cuttings from Clos de Vougeot in Burgundy. This means that today there is great genetic variation between the plants, as there is not one mother plant, but many. The method is called Selection Massale. Heger (and we) believe this helps to explain the incredible depth and complexity of the wine. Furthermore, the soil is pure volcano, which is absolutely ideal for top quality production. The vines are cared for organically and give a very small yield, and the cellar work follows all the rules of the art. All these factors combined result in an exceptionally concentrated, intense and characterful wine that has not only placed itself at the top of Heger’s hierarchy, but also at the top of Kaiserstuhl’s and Baden’s, indeed at the top of Germany’s red wine hierarchy. There are not many above or even next to it.
Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate
95-96 points
Falstaff
96 points
Colour: Ruby red.
Smell: A truly beautiful and colossally intense aroma with a hellish concoction that alternates between cherries, barrel toast, lifted red fruit nerve, volcanic smoke, vanilla, currants, tar, red roses and a distant hint of mint. A volcanic eruption of aromas, one is tempted to say.
Tasting notes: The taste is at once as violently intense and complex as it is tamed and elegant. Like other of the world’s greatest Pinot Noir wines, it is ethereally airy, intense and deep, quiveringly electric, full-bodied, elegant, rich, delicate, muscular, yes, impossible to pin down just one word or character trait. It waves back and forth between the deep/rich and the airy/energetic.
Serving suggestion: Give it a good decantation (2+ hours) and enjoy it slightly chilled (15-16 degrees) when you deserve something extra special.
Weingut Dr. Heger was founded in 1935 by Dr. Max Heger. He was a country doctor, and since most of his patients were winemakers, it wasn’t long before he was also “infected”. Soon all his spare time was devoted to amateur winemaking, and in 1935 he took the plunge. He bought fields in Archkarrer Schlossberg and Ihringer Winklerberg, which were to become the basis for one of Germany’s most renowned producers.
Although Max Heger had passed the age of 50, he had to find a stethoscope and smock again when he was drafted as a medic during World War II. A few years after the war, he left the day-to-day management of the winery to his son Wolfgang “Mimus” Heger. In 1981, Wolfgang’s son, Joachim, entered the picture and in 1986 he also founded a “daughter winery” called Weinhaus Heger, which was to help satisfy the high demand for the now world-famous Heger wines. Here you allow yourself to use a share of purchased grapes from selected partners, but the team in the cellar is the same as behind Dr. The Heger wines.
