It’s tempting to think, given its name, that the town of Weinfelden (Wine Fields) in beautiful, bucolic Canton Thurgau is in the centre of a significant winegrowing region. In fact, the area which spreads out south of Lake Constance is today better known for its fruit-growing: apple and pear orchards outnumber the canton’s 260 hectares of vineyards by a long chalk. Nevertheless, the region takes its wine – and wine tourism – seriously – witness the newly created, award-winning Weinweg Weinfelden, which takes a signposted hike around the gentle, south-facing Ottenberg hill just south of the town.
One of my top picks on the route – and a significant player in the Swiss wine world – is Schlossgut Bachtobel. Unlike many Swiss wineries, this is a proper country estate, owned by the same family since 1784. The various buildings that make up the Schlossgut include a small Biedermeier gem of a manor house crowned with a mansard roof, around which clusters a collection of half-timbered outbuildings which house the winery operation and some apartments.
The pièces de résistance here are two massive wooden wine presses, one dated 1584 and the other 1729. Far from being just museum pieces, once a year at harvest time these are dusted down, cleaned up and used to press the grapes for their top Pinot Noir cuvée. It sums up the estate’s philosophy, where the ancient and the modern work side by side.
When Johannes Meier took over the property in 2008 on the sudden death of his uncle, Hans-Ullrich Kesselring, the reputation of Bachtobel wines was already well established. The challenge for Meier was to take this on and build on it. They farm six hectares of vineyards using integrated production methods (a sort of halfway house between conventional and organic farming), and the plan is for Bachtobel to be fully organic by 2021.
Only 20 percent of the house wines are white and of these, the biggest by volume is Riesling-Sylvaner. They prefer to call the wine Müller-Thurgau, using the name of its creator Professor Müller, a son of Canton Thurgau. This widely planted, mightily prolific grape has been exported to cool-climate vineyards all over the world. Much of it is soft, flabby and uninspiring; in the capable hands of Bachtobel’s winemaker Ines Rebentrost, the wine is appealingly aromatic and crisp. She achieves this by drastically reducing yields, picking in good time and vinifying without secondary fermentation. Another white to try is their Sauvignon Blanc, which has plenty of the grape’s customary wow factor while retaining a cool, crisp elegance.
The great majority of the vineyards are planted with Pinot Noir. These are the wines that have made the estate’s reputation since Hans-Ullrich Kesselring took it over in the 1970s. Today they make four different ones, simply and boldly labelled Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4. They trace a nice progression from the simple, pale cherry red, bright and fruity entry-level wine via the somewhat richer, more complex No. 2, which has a bit more substance thanks to a longer time on the skins and ageing in large oak vats. For No. 3, carefully selected grapes are pressed ever so gently in the two ancient wooden wine presses before ageing in barriques for 15 months. A real cool-climate Pinot with bags of Pinot character and flavour, it’s worth salting away for at least five years to give it full rein.
No. 4 is their most self-consciously modern wine, the project of the new team of Johannes Meier and his winemaker Ines Rebentrost, whose aim is to make a Bachtobel Pinot with their own stamp on it. For this wine, grapes from the best plots are selected and a proportion of them are pressed, stems and all – a practice that is increasingly favoured by ambitious winemakers for the added freshness and texture they believe it brings to the wine. No. 4 is finished for one year in new barriques. I like to think that Hans-Ullrich Kesselring would approve of the direction the new generation has taken with this distinct Pinot, which is made only in the best years and whose sales are limited to three bottles per customer.
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ADDRESS: Bachtobelstrasse 76 8570 Weinfelden CONTACT: Tel. 071 622 54 07 |
WINES TO LOOK OUT FOR: Sauvignon Blanc Pinot Noir Nos 1, 2, 3 and 4 |
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info@bachtobel.ch |
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Price range 19 to 52 SFr. |
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HIGHLIGHTS: Possibility to book cellar and vineyard tour plus tasting Monday to Saturday from June to September. Winery shop open 10–2 and wines can be ordered from the website. Weinweg Weinfelden vineyard trail |
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