schiller-wine: Tasting at Weingut J.B. Becker in Walluf, Rheingau, with Hajo Becker – Germany-North Tour 2017 by ombiasy WineTours

Picture: Tasting with Hajo Becker, Weingut J.B. Becker in Walluf/ Rheingau

The tasting at Weingut J.B. Becker in Walluf/ Rheingau with Cult-winemaker was the last visit of a winery on the Germany-North Tour by ombiasy WineTours 2017. After the tasting, we had lunch at Italian Restaurant at Weingut von Oetinger (where we ran into Owner/ Winemaker Achim von Oetinger), before going to the Frankfurt Airport.

Hajo Becker was our host. His wive Eva Becker and his sister Maria Becker welcomed us.

Our tasting took place right on the banks of the Rhine River in the idyllic Weingarten of Weingut J.B. Becker

We started the day with breakfast at Weingut Kruger-Rumpf, where we stayed over-night. We crossed the Rhine River by ferry in Rüdesheim and then drove up the Rhine River from Rüdesheim to Walluf.

Pictures: Crossing the Rhine River in Rüdesheim by Ferry

Weingut J.B. Becker

Weingut J.B. Becker is in Walluf in the Rheingau , close to Wiesbaden. It was founded by Hajo's grandfather Jean Baptist Becker in 1893. Hajo Becker took over the family estate in 1971, jointly with his sister Maria Becker.

Hajo Becker is a trained winemaker. He got his formal education at the Geisenheim university and his practical education at Weingut Schloss Eltz, were he did an apprenticeship and also worked as a winemaker.

Recently, Hajo Becker married Eva and it is now a trio that is running the Becker operations.

Pictures: Welcome at Weingut J.B.Becker - Hajo, Eva and Maria Becker

Hans-Josef Becker is also one of the best-known wine commission agents in Germany, bidding on behalf of interested buyers.

The vineyard area totals 13 hectares, all in the Walkenberg site. 75% of the area is planted with Riesling. Pinot Noir and Müller-Thurgau account for the rest. The wines are traditionally matured in oak barrels for a very long time. The Riesling wines are bone-dry, and very long-lived.

Unusually, five to ten ten vintages are typically on the list of Weingut J.B. Becker.

Stuart Pigott on Hajo Becker

In 2013, Hans-Joseph Becker was Stuart Pigott's Winemaker of the Year. At this occasion, Stuart Pigott wrote a nice little paragraph about Hajo Becker in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (in German):

Stuart Pigott’s Favorites of 2013
Winemaker of the Year
Hans-Joseph Becker, Weingut J.B. Becker, Walluf/Rheingau

Stuart Pigott: It is a paradox: In the wine scene, Hajo Becker is sometimes dismissed as old-fashioned winery, but a community of young, dynamic sommeliers and retailers adore his wines. For them, his wines belong to the most original wines in Germany – and they are right. Hajo Becker is a traditionalist - in comparison with many colleagues in the Rheingau, who run after each wine-cellar fashion. One of his most important resource is time. His Rieslings all remain a whole year in old oak barrels on the lees, which is neither nostalgia nor wanted, but simply his method. So they mature into a great harmony, regardless whether the vintage is rather lush and rich in alcohol or lean and acidic. The Becker wines are delicate and subtle. They always improve through aging in the bottle.

Those, who are only interested in the newly bottled 2012 Becker wines, miss an important dimension of Becker's flavor universe! Of course, dry wines are the focus, since Hajo Becker took over the family estate from his father in 1971. But he also produces impressive Riesling Spätlese wines with some residual sweetness, which also goes against the trend.

Pictures: Weingut J.B. Becker including Der Wintergarten

Stephen Bitterolf (vom Boden) on Hajo Becker

In the USA, Weingut J.B. Becker is imported by vom Boden (Stephen Bitterolf). Stephen has a couple of paragraphs on his website.

vom Boden: These wines taste like NOTHING else coming out of the Rheingau and Hans-Josef Becker just doesn’t give a ****.

We struggled with a more elegant way of introducing this estate, some poignant lines contrasting the manicured lawns of the aristocratic estates with the dirty-fingered, weathered-skin, mess-of-a-tasting-room aesthetic at J.B. Becker.

Yet Hans-Joseph’s (call him “HaJo”) winemaking has less to do with a condemnation or critique of the noble establishment (even if it deserves either or both) and more to do with a vision that is so singular and steadfast that it feels totally irrelevant whether you or I or anyone thinks Becker’s “aesthetic” is genius or folly. It just is.

The wines have an in-your-face, love-it-or-hate-it sensibility. They are unfailingly honest. They present a bizarre vocabulary: dried earth and rocks, herbs, something vaguely subterranean, a savory, briny, smoky atmosphere that slowly reveals fine layers of bright citrus. For all this depth and mysteriousness, Becker’s white wines are like Becker himself: angular, tensile with awkward elbows and muscle and sinew pulled tightly over a lean frame. They flaunt a rather prominent acidity that recalls the more nervy wines of the Mosel, Saar and Ruwer, though there is a weight, a density that speaks of the Rheingau. They seem to have more to do with great Chablis than with what we often think of as German Riesling.

The overall effect, one must say, is bewildering and inspiring. Becker seems to relish the paradox. If there is any grand system here, it is inscrutable.

Consider, on the one hand, that Becker (and his father before him) has worked the vineyards organically for many, many years (they have been certified since 2011). On the other hand, this rather important fact is mentioned exactly nowhere so far as I can tell. Not on the labels, not at the estate. HaJo mentioned it to me exactly once, almost as an aside. The life of the vineyard, at all levels, is profoundly important to Becker and he thinks about it deeply. He just doesn’t talk about it much.

Becker is a strong advocate of wild-yeast fermentations. This practice puts the graying wild-statesman of German winemaking right next to the young German hipster-growers, as obsessed with natural yeasts as anything else. On the other hand, since vintage 2003 Becker has bottled his wine with glass closures, which of course alienates him from this same population.

Becker prefers to use pressurized tanks for fermentation, relishing a quick, warm fermentation (a similar method is used at places like J.J. Prüm, Keller, etc). Then he racks the juice into the traditional barrels of the Rheingau for at least two years of barrel age before bottling. In other words: Gun the bitch and then slam on the breaks and wait out all the others.

Pictures: Tasting with Hajo Becker

Even with these very long élevages, Becker seems to release wines willy-nilly – he keeps older vintages around because, in a way, the wines demand it. I have had plenty of Kabinett Trockens at well over 20 years of age and they are gossamer and fine and sprightly and profound.

I’m not sure anyone really knows what to make of HaJo. Certainly there are no easy answers to anything at Becker. So here are the facts.

The estate was founded in 1893 by HaJo’s grandfather, Jean Baptiste Becker. He was a cooper and began accumulating some vineyards and voila, he started a winery. J.B. Becker died in 1944 at the age of 73. So the story goes, he saw a young child drowning in the Rhein River, yet even at his advanced age he jumped in, saved the child, then had a heart attack and died. There is a moving letter about the incident in the tasting room. Suffice it to say HaJo comes from a long line of bad asses. Becker’s father Josef grew the estate and in the 1930s befriended a young importer by the name of Frank Schoonmaker. They became good friends and Becker acted as Schoonmaker’s consultant and consolidator for some time.

Hajo himself went to Geisenheim in the 1960s and did all that proper education stuff but as he tells it, his great revelation came in the cellars of Schloss Eltz in the early 1960s. Schloss Eltz, it should be said, made some of the greatest wines of the Rheingau from the 1950s through the 70s. The wines are just epic, if rather unknown these days because the estate sold its land in the 1980s. In any event, Becker was studying with the cellar master at Eltz, a gentleman by the name of Hermann Neuser, in the early 1960s and this is where he first began tasting dry Rieslings, fresh from the cask in the cellar… before any süssreserve was added. The wines were a revelation to him and when he took over the family estate with vintage 1971, he began focusing heavily on dry Rieslings.

I remember HaJo narrating this to me one time and, with bated breath, I asked: “Well, what happened when you switched to dry winemaking?” HaJo, never one for much talking, simply said: “I lost all my customers.” And then he took another sip of wine.

Nearly 50 years later, Becker’s glorious wines are finally getting the attention and the praise they deserve. So far as I can tell he anticipated the dry wine movement in the Rheingau a few decades before anyone else. I asked him how all the new-found attention made him feel. He said, rather quietly and matter-of-factly, “Ït’s nice.”

Then he took another sip of wine.

With Hajo and Eva Becker in New York

In 2017, Weingut J.B. Becker was one of the 13 star winemakers of the Annual Rieslingfeier in New York, organized by Stephen Bitterolf.

Pictures: Annette Schiller, Eva Becker, Hajo Becker, Stephen Bitterolf, Egon Müller, Daniel Vollenweider at the Rieslingfeier in New York (2017). See: The Annual "Slaughterhouse" Riesling Feast in New York: Rieslingfeier 2017, USA

The Wines Hajo Poured

2014 Weingut J.B. Becker Blanc de Noir brut nature

2015 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Kabinett trocken
2008 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Kabinett trocken
1994 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Kabinett trocken

2009 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Spätlese trocken
2010 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Spätlese trocken
2010 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Spätlese trocken Alte Reben

2015 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Spätlese trocken
2015 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Spätlese trocken Alte Reben

2007 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Auslese trocken
2012 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Oberberg Riesling Kabinett halbtrocken
2015 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Sonnenberg Riesling Spätlese
1989 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Riesling Auslese

2014 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Spätburgunder Kabinett trocken
2013 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Spätburgunder Spätlese trocken Alte Reben
2012 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Walkenberg Spätburgunder Spätlese trocken
1994 Weingut J.B. Becker Wallufer Rheingau Spätburgunder Kabinett trocken