Federweißer

The cloudy half-made wine of the German autumn, grape must caught mid-ferment and drunk within days, still fizzing and still sweet, with onion tart alongside

Origin: The Mosel, the Rheingau and the Palatinate, Germany

From the journey of Grapes.

Federweißer is wine caught in the middle of becoming wine. Freshly pressed grape must is left to ferment, and at the point where perhaps half its sugar has turned to alcohol it is drunk exactly as it is: cloudy, pale, sweet, actively fizzing, and about four per cent alcohol. It exists for a few weeks in September and October and cannot be bought at any other time, because it will not keep and cannot be stopped. It is sold in bottles with loose caps or pierced lids, because a sealed bottle of actively fermenting must will burst, and it must be carried upright. Shops in the wine regions stack it in open crates with signs telling you not to lay it down. The name means feather-white, for the yeast in suspension; Austria calls it Sturm, and further south it is neuer Wein or Suser. The fixed partner is Zwiebelkuchen, the yeasted onion and bacon tart of the same season, and the pairing is one of the few genuinely immovable ones in German eating. Villages along the Mosel and in the Palatinate hold Federweißerfeste for it, and the combination of sweet fizzing must and savoury onion tart is the taste of the German grape harvest. Those vineyards are Roman in origin. The legions planted the Mosel and the Rhine in the first and second centuries, and by about 370 CE Ausonius was writing a poem in praise of the river and its terraced slopes. The monasteries carried it forward, Riesling appears by name in a Rheingau document of 1435, and the impossibly steep slate terraces above the Mosel remain some of the most northerly serious vineyards in the world.

Ingredients

Must

  • 4 kg very ripe white grapes (Riesling, Silvaner or Müller-Thurgau)

Ferment

  • 1 g wine yeast, or the wild yeast on the fruit
  • 1 tsp sugar, only if the grapes are not fully ripe

Method

  1. Pick over the grapes and remove every stem, leaf, and damaged berry, but do not wash them if you intend to rely on wild yeast.
  2. Crush the grapes thoroughly, by hand in a large bowl or with a potato masher, until all the fruit has burst and released its juice.
  3. Strain the juice through a coarse sieve or a jelly bag into a clean fermentation vessel, pressing lightly. You should have about 2.5 litres of must.
  4. Stir in the wine yeast if you are using it. Cover the vessel with muslin or fit an airlock, and leave at cool room temperature, around 18 to 20C.
  5. Within a day or two it will begin to foam vigorously and turn cloudy. Taste it daily from the third day.
  6. It is ready when it is still noticeably sweet but clearly alcoholic and fizzing on the tongue, usually between three and five days.
  7. Strain off into a jug and drink cold, within a day or two at most, keeping it in the refrigerator and never sealed tight.

Notes

Never seal the bottle. Fermentation is producing gas continuously and a sealed container will burst. Commercial federweißer is sold with a deliberately loose cap and must be carried upright. It is genuinely alcoholic despite tasting like grape juice, typically four to five per cent and rising by the day. Red grapes give Federroter or Roter Sauser, which is made the same way and is common in Württemberg. In Austria the same drink is Sturm, and it is sold under strict rules limiting the season in which it may be called that.

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