Karl H. Johner winery - Baden wine region

Weingut Karl H. Johner

In 1985, Karlheinz Johner, after ten years abroad, together with his wife Irene a small winery in Bischoffingen, her home town in the Kaiserstuhl.
His model were the wines from Burgundy - full force and yet with supreme elegance. The Burgundians were much more complex and more modern than the Kaiserstuhl produced until then, rather simple red wines. First, the new style of winemaking were observed very suspicious both by the winemakers and the authorities. Against all odds, the young winery established but soon as a pioneer of the new German wine style of international caliber.
1991 we started to build the new winery. Our goal was to create the conditions for a gentle grape processing possible. Another important criterion was also beautifying the city entrance by a pleasant building. Imaginative, was an almost cloister-like winery with tower created with widely projecting roofs and thick, down to earth masonry.

Documents and Terroir
The term terroir is often totally misunderstood. Often it is simply reduced to the soil formation of the vineyard that in extreme cases, exactly this and to be responsible for the taste of a wine that stone. However, is this credible?
Tastes a wine the customer good or not so good, a declaration lazy winemakers will simply say: Cest le terroir (Thats the terroir). Even photographers adorn glossy pages of wine magazines with pictures of rocks and soil. The images are to believe the readers that the wine its flavor from the ground on which he receives is growing.
To open the too credulous ply and Terroir- vehicle trailers something the eye, let us first give some basic knowledge.

The climate
Light, temperature, water and wind are important factors that allow the growth of plants only. But only after a precise detection of quantity of light, day and night temperatures, frost, rainfall distribution and wind frequency shows whether a place on a region or an area for a certain grape variety is suitable or not.

The floor
With the naked eye not seen is the most important property of the soil, the plant available water capacity. A soil with a high water capacity provides the plant enough water even in dry vintages. In normal or wet vintages the vine has perhaps too much water and is quality suffering because of the higher yield. But soils with low water holding capacity can be dry years lead to undesirable results. For lack of water photosynthesis is set and the plant initially consumed their own reserve materials. However, a slight stress situation seems positive in the sense of a delayed vegetative growth towards enhanced reserve material storage.

Karl H. Johner Winery