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.

Tradition is the estate's foundational red. The fruit comes from young vines planted inside Fürst's Grosse Lage and Erste Lage vineyards, Germany's equivalents of grand and premier cru, blended with very old vines rooted at the foot of the slopes. Yields average 45 hectoliters per hectare, lean for a wine at this tier. Between 5 and 35 percent of the fruit goes into the vat as whole clusters, split between wooden and concrete fermenters, and the wine then spends more than a year in used barrels so the fruit, not the oak, carries the glass.

Red cherry and raspberry lead, with cranberry, a leafy lift of black currant leaf, and a pinch of white pepper. The palate is juicy and light on its feet, with fine-grained tannins and a cool, stony finish that invites a second sip. Drink through 2032.