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.
Hundsrück appears in documents from 1525 as the smallest and steepest neighbor of Centgrafenberg, and it was officially restored as a named vineyard in 2010. It sits at the eastern end of the Bürgstadter Berg, a convex slope facing due south at a 40 percent incline, where friable, weathered rock lies under a thin, gravelly topsoil that warms quickly and drains freely. Fürst's 2.9 hectares are dominated by old vines, filled in with new plantings as dense as 17,000 vines per hectare, and yields are held to 35 hectoliters per hectare. Fermentation runs 45 to 100 percent whole cluster, followed by 16 to 18 months in barrels, about half new. The family calls Hundsrück its flagship, and Stephan Reinhardt of the Wine Advocate gave the 2023 97 points.
Sour cherry and black cherry are threaded with wild rose, dark earth, and whole wheat toast. The palate is silky and generous yet tightly structured, with very fine tannins and a savory, saline finish of great length. It rewards patience or a long decant; drink 2030 through 2048.
