Producer Spotlight: Germany's Sven Enderle

For this dinner at Akdeniz, a favorite Turkish restaurant in Midtown West, we will sample the wines of German's producer Sven Enderle. I bought 5 different wines from this producer, including 2 Pinot Noirs. I can't find any reviews, but I'll reprint the importer's notes for each wine.

Here is a link to Akdeniz' menu

Just a reminder of our usual rules:

The cost of this event is $34 and is for the wines and corkage. You will also have to pay the cost of your food (plus 33% for tax and tip). Please order at least two courses (i.e. a main dish and appetizer ). There are very few restaurants that allow us to bring our own wine for a low corkage.

NOTE: Meetup has started charging a "Partner Fee" that is above and in addition to the listed price of the event. It is annoying and confusing, but there is nothing I can do about it. It comes to approximately $4 more for each RSVP. You will see this charge when you complete your rsvp and pay for the event. MEETUP+ members are exempt from this charge.

Please read and understand the group's cancellation policy. If you take spot, then cancel, and no one else takes the spot, you will not receive a refund or credit. No refunds or credits will be given for no-shows or late cancellations (unless someone else takes your spot). All cancellations are subject to a $6 service fee.

Lastly: NO DRINKING AND DRIVING

The Wines (notes will be distributed at the dinner):
2022 Sven Enderle Müller-Thurgau ($16) -Sven has always made terrific Müller Thurgau, a Rodney Dangerfield "I can't get no respect" grape and then some. It was always a staple of the range of Enderle & Moll wines, and follows suit that he continue to make it. Germany has a ton of Müller Thurgau, which makes it a prime candidate to make very good wines from very underappreciated resources. It is made with a shorter but still significant amount of skin contact, enough to give it some textural appeal and subtle chewiness but not to an orange wine degree. With aeration, the wine really opened up beautifully, with very expressive perfume, leading to a a similarly pure and intense inner mouth perfume and medium bodied palate; it is plain delicious and mouthwatering.

NV Sven Enderle Pinot Noir Alea ($16) - Named after Sven's niece Alea, it came about as a product of circumstance, not measured intentionality. The end result is something unforeseen that is totally compelling, unique and tasty, where two disparate elements combine to make something much more interesting than either would yield standing alone. From the 2022 vintage, Sven made a longer skin contact Pinot Gris wine (roughly 8 or 9 days), aka an orange wine. Following the wine's evolution, he was never really pleased/thrilled with the wine, so he continued to wait to see if it would evolve in a promising direction with time and patience. A year later, during the 2023 harvest, there were a lot of Pinot Noir grapes that were not tip top ideal for making his red wines. Given such circumstances, he decided to make a rosé wine with the Pinot Noir fruit that didn't make the cut, as you can make perfectly good and quaffable rose wine with mostly free run juice and limited skin contact. He then got a bit experimental and tried to blend a small amount of the 2022 Pinot Gris orange wine with the juicy juiciness of the 2023 Pinot Noir rosé, and really liked the interplay/complexity of the combination. He went whole hog and blended all of it together, which is how this totally tasty oddity was born. There is both aromatic and flavor complexity from the Pinot Gris, as well as some textural chewy appeal that orange wines allow for, as well as the juiciness and perfume of the Pinot Noir rosé component. This will make an awesome everyday quaffer, both for your aperitif/cold&wet&tasty needs, as well as a wine that will offer very good food accompaniment complexity due to its light skin contact grippiness.

2022 Sven Enderle Lemberger ($32) -Lemberger, aka Blaufrankisch, is another underappreciated varietal that has tremendous potential for offering generous and highly qualitative yields, with wines that are super appetitzing, digest, and intense. I only tasted this "basic" Lemberger, from one of his principal grape growing families outside of Heilbronn. In an impressively deep, dark blue fruited vein with a positively silky texture and zero traces of anything rustic whatsoever, this wine had me instantly salivating to drink this with abandon. Just how much flavor intensity there is at just 12% of alcohol boggles the mind. I am delighted to be able to feature such a qualitatively awesome Lemberger wine as the first of my career.

2022 Sven Enderle Pinot Noir ($32) -As we step into the world of Baden Pinot Noir, the heart of Sven's greatest wine passion (and let's face it, just as it is for sooooo many wine lovers the world over, myself included), I was blown away by just how freakin' good this is. The amount of flavor intensity, of deep red fruited sappiness and spice, all wonderfully harmonized and silky textured, found me just shaking my head in disbelief. Sven mentioned to me when I asked him about the pricing, "They're not inexpensive...." to which I guffawed once he told me the price. You will never in your life get such beautifully made and intense Pinot Noir for this kind of price, not without a time machine going back some two decades.....growers in California and Burgundy would blush if this was in a blind tasting once the pricing was revealed. This is sourced from 5 different sources from different parts of Baden, an example of harmonized complexity of disparate elements that combine to make a wonderfully complete whole. 12% alcohol. How such flavor intensity is possible from just 12% alcohol is plain magical. Fwiw, the Michelin starred, Trittenheim based restaurant Wein & Tafelhaus has been blowing through this wine, one hundred + bottles at time, with fantastic returns.

2022 Sven Enderle Pinot Noir vom Keuper ($53) -Things took a noteworthy step up in their distilled focus and singular intensity as we stepped into the "single soil type" level in the range, both of which are basically single source, single vineyard wines. Keuper is a type of marl/mudstone/sandstone that is quite commonly found in Baden, but quite distinct from pure sandstone which is called Buntsandstein in German. The aromatics for this wine immediately presented even deeper and finer than the basic Pinot Noir, with undeniable more stuffing/dry extract/soil signature. In complexity, sheer deliciousness, and class, this is a ridiculous value on the world stage.