German labels can be confusing and just when you think you can identify the producer, grape, village, vineyard and quality level, you discover that the label contain even more information that can be a trap to the unwary. I'm talking about Fuders, Stars and the A.P.#.
For those just getting into German wine I thought I would explain what these are. here goes:
FUDER NUMBER- Literally this refers to the barrel (or Fuder) where the wine was aged. Each Fuder contains about 110 cases. Some producers will bottle each Fuder seperately while others will combine all of their Fuders. Those that bottle seperately will put out 2 or more wines with the exact same label except for a very tiny print indicating the Fuder #. Merkelbach for instance put out about a half dozen different Spatlese Urzinger Wirzgartens with different Fuder #s on them. The WA has rated most of them seperately. Some producers will not put the different Fuder #'s on the bottle but instead will make you refer to the AP# (more on that later) which makes things even more confusing.
STARS- Stars are like "Reserve" wines in California. Some producers will put out up to 4 different bottles of the same wine and mark their better bottles with stars on the label. Some producers do not use stars at all. It is standard to have 4 levels (zero, *, **, or ***). More stars means riper grapes and generally better wines. An example is JJ Cristoffel who made a zero star, one star, two star and three star Auslese Urzinger Wurzgarten. Other than little astericks next to the name of the wine the labels look the same.
THE A.P. NUMBER- By law, every German bottle has a long string of numbers somewhere on the label. AP stands for Amtliche Prüfnummer (in English governmental proof number or governmental approved number). Recently, Carl Schmitt-Wagner (owner of a well respected estate) emailed me a very good explanation of this number which explains what all the numbers mean. Here is how he expained the following AP#:
A.P. 3 533 117 18 02
"3 = The location number of the governmental office in this case "Trier/Mosel"
533 = The location number of the village in this case "Longuich/Mosel"
117 = The location number of the winery in this case Winery Carl Schmitt-Wagner
18 = Number of the wine what was submitted, in this case the 2001 Longuicher Maximiner Herrenberg Auslese
02 = The Year of the submittal or better the approval of the wine by the goverment"
As I said, some producers do not put a fuder # on the bottle but instead rely only on the AP #. If a producer bottled his fuders seperately and did not put a fuder # on the bottle than look to the 2nd to last set of numbers in the AP # (in the example above it is the #18). This will identify the fuder. In some of the WA's reviews, the last 2 sets of AP #s are refered to.
I hope you will find this helpful in your search for the best German wines.
VM
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