Light Red Wines

Hello,

in the tascas along the Minho, red wine arrives at the table in a white ceramic bowl, cold from the barrel, alongside grilled sardines. Vinho Verde Tinto rarely exceeds ten per cent, stains the tongue violet, and that is how it has always been drunk there.

What is habit on the Minho is craft elsewhere. A red wine is light today only because someone has made it so: early harvest, whole bunches, a few days on the skins, steel rather than new oak. Here are six producers, from the Lima Valley to the Ahr, who do precisely that.

Six reds between 11.5 and 12.5 per cent, from five countries. Just under an hour in the fridge, and they will sit at 12 to 14 °C.

Vinho Verde · Trentino · Südburgenland · Savoie · Ahr · Burgundy

Aphros

Vasco Croft was an architect before he began making wine in 2004 on the family estate Casal do Paço in the Lima Valley, biodynamic from the outset and Demeter-certified since 2011. He is regarded as a pioneer of biodynamics in Portugal. His wines ferment with wild yeasts in granite lagares, the shallow stone troughs in which grapes have been trodden in the Minho for centuries.

Vinhão has pigment-rich skins, the must emerges from the lagar almost black, and the wine has its own drinking culture: cold, from the bowl, with food.

Foradori

Elisabetta Foradori lost her father when she was eleven, and her mother kept the estate in Campo Rotaliano going. In 1984, aged twenty and fresh from the San Michele wine school, she took over the cellar. While all of Italy was planting Cabernet, she staked everything on the near-forgotten Teroldego, selecting it vine by vine and converting to biodynamics in 2002. From 2008 she filled the first tinajas, clay amphorae from Spain. Today she works alongside her children.

The Lezèr owes its existence to a hailstorm. In 2017, hail destroyed forty per cent of the Teroldego harvest. Foradori made experimental fermentations from what remained (fewer than twenty-four hours on the skins), and the wine that emerged takes its name from the Trentino dialect word for “light”. Today it runs to around fifty thousand bottles from four hectares, roughly four-fifths Teroldego, with Schiava, Lagrein and a little Merlot.

Clemens Krutzler

At the Eisenberg in Südburgenland, the vines grow on greenschist and mica schist, at the foot of the hill on iron-red clay, under Pannonian heat, with air from the south and cool nights at 280 to 400 metres. Here Reinhold Krutzler makes the Perwolff, one of the country's most concentrated Blaufränkisch. His son Clemens, the fifth generation of the family estate, worked at Le Verre Volé in Paris and in the Swartland before launching his own CK range in 2020: natural yeasts, minimal intervention, five months in steel and nine months in used 500-litre barrels, unfiltered and without added sulphur.

Domaine des Orchis

Philippe Héritier is an agricultural engineer who bred snails before he cleared the abandoned steep slopes above Frangy in the Haute-Savoie in 2006 and assembled a domaine parcel by parcel. Altesse and Mondeuse grow there on glacial moraine. The wines mature for one to two years in a hexagonal cellar in Poisy that he had built to the golden ratio, modelled on the theatre at Epidaurus. Jean Sulpice lists the wines on his menu, and his restaurant in Talloires sits directly below one of the domaine's parcels.

Bertram-Baltes

Julia Bertram, fifth generation of a winemaking family from Dernau and German Wine Queen in 2012, bottled her first vintage under her own label in 2014. Benedikt Baltes from Mayschoß was for many years estate manager in Klingenberg am Main, and in 2020 the two merged their estates. The floods of July 2021 took their cellar, barrel store and almost their entire stock of bottles. Their Spätburgunder remain below twelve per cent, without chaptalisation, without fining, without cultured yeasts, fermented in wood from local oak and bottled unfiltered.

Thomas-Collardot

Two and a half hectares in the heart of Puligny-Montrachet, run by Jacqueline Collardot and her son Matthieu. Until the 2014 vintage the grapes went to négociants. Since 2015 they bottle themselves, and their white wines from Les Enseignères and Hameau de Blagny tend to sell out quickly. From the same cellar comes a light red, Pinot Noir with Gamay, whole bunches, from a parcel below the Puligny vineyards. We gave the Gamay its own edition a week ago. Here it appears again, as the junior partner in the lightest Burgundy in the selection.

The six light reds together

Six reds from five countries, none above 12.5 per cent. Chill them just under an hour before dinner, ideally on one of those evenings when you can still sit outside.

	Aphros Vinhão 2020 Vinho Verde · 11.5% · approx. €15 The red from the ceramic bowl, cold with sardines.
	Foradori Lezèr 2024 Trentino · 12.5% · approx. €19 Born from the hail harvest of 2017, named “light” in dialect.
	Clemens Krutzler Blaufränkisch 2023 Südburgenland · 11.5% · approx. €21 Five days in an open vat, no added sulphur, from the Eisenberg.
	Orchis Quintessence de Mondeuse 2020 Savoie · 11.5% · approx. €27 Glacial moraine above Frangy, six years old, pepper and blood orange.
	Bertram-Baltes Dernauer Spätburgunder 2022 Ahr · 11.5% · approx. €27 Without chaptalisation, unfiltered, raspberry and pomegranate.
	Thomas-Collardot “Le Pierrot” 2023 Burgundy · 12.5% · approx. €32.50 Pinot Noir with Gamay from the Chardonnay village of Puligny.

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Our search classifies over a hundred reds in the range as light, from the ten-euro bottle upwards.

Warm regards from Berlin,

Lisa and the team at
Living Wines

P.S.: With these wines we put the Zalto Universal on the table. Zalto itself recommends the Burgundy glass for wines above thirteen per cent. Our six sit below that, and in the narrower Universal the fruit and acidity stay together. Two glasses approx. €94.