The Fürst family has tended vines in Bürgstadt since at least 1638, but the estate's modern story begins in 1979, when Paul and Monika Fürst took over a 1.5-hectare mixed farm and began restoring the steep, terraced parcels on the slopes above the Main. Long before German pinot noir had an international audience, Paul was trading notes with growers in Burgundy, Oregon, and Switzerland's Bündner Herrschaft, and Jancis Robinson would later call him “an acknowledged Pinot magician in Germany.” His son Sebastian trained at Geisenheim and in Burgundy, joined in 2007, and has run the 21-hectare estate with his wife Isabell since 2018; father and son have each been named German Winemaker of the Year. The vines grow on Buntsandstein, an iron-rich red sandstone laid down some 250 million years ago that holds the day's heat into the night, and they are farmed organically without certification and fed with compost made on the estate. In the cellar, fermentations run on indigenous yeasts in open-top vats, and every red is bottled without fining or filtration.

The Bürgstadter is Fürst's village wine, and it is the bottle Sebastian Fürst names when asked where a newcomer to the estate should begin. It draws on 3 hectares of Bürgstadt vines planted between 1983 and 2010, set between 190 and 300 meters above the Main, and it includes younger parcels inside the village's top sites that are held back from the single-vineyard bottlings. Between 20 and 50 percent of the fruit ferments as whole clusters, and the wine ages 16 to 18 months in used barrels. Stephan Reinhardt of the Wine Advocate gave the 2023 94 points and counted it among the most complex village-level wines being made anywhere in Germany. 

Black cherry and blackberry sit over forest floor, damp earth, and a light toastiness. The palate is dense and round yet firmly built, with a long, saline finish that keeps pulling you back. Drink through 2036.