Voluntary designations
Blanc de Noirs, Rotling, Steillage, vintage: other label terms
Blanc de Noirs means, for sparkling wine: pressed white from red grapes. Rotling requires a blend of white and red grapes, Steillage requires at least 30% slope gradient. Vintage and grape variety may only appear on the label if at least 85% of the grapes come from that year and that variety.
Blanc de Noirs: white sparkling wine from red grapes
The juice of almost all red grapes is pale. The colour sits in the skin and only enters the wine if the juice and skins stay together for a while. Press red grapes immediately and gently, and you get a pale must. That's exactly what becomes a Blanc de Noirs, literally 'white from black'. German wine law explicitly permits the term for sparkling wine, quality sparkling wine and semi-sparkling wine when red grapes are pressed as if making white wine and the resulting wine has a colour typical of white wine.
A faint salmon or copper tinge can occur, but a clearly rosé-coloured wine no longer counts as a Blanc de Noirs. In Germany, Spätburgunder and Schwarzriesling mainly serve as the base, while internationally it's Pinot Noir and Meunier. The counterpart is called Blanc de Blancs, 'white from whites', meaning a sparkling wine made solely from white grapes—for Champagne, usually Chardonnay. What sets the two styles apart in the glass is explained in our journey through Champagne.
Rotling Sekt and Rosé Sekt: what's the difference?
Rotling is all about blending before the wine is even made. White and red grapes, or their mash—the crushed berries along with the skins—are processed together. The result is pale red and a German speciality, known for example as Schillerwein from Württemberg. Under Paragraph 32 of the German Wine Ordinance, a Sekt may only be called Rotling if its base wine itself would qualify for that name.
A Rosé Sekt, by contrast, is usually made from red grapes whose juice had only brief contact with the skins. For still wine, EU law forbids making rosé by blending white and red wine. Champagne, however, explicitly allows this method for its rosé: white and red Champagne wine are blended before the second fermentation. So when comparing Rosé Sekt and Rosé Champagne, you're often comparing two entirely different paths to the same colour.
Steep slope on the Sekt label
Some Sekt bottles carry a word more often associated with Mosel Rieslings: Steillage or Steillagenwein, meaning 'steep slope'. Paragraph 34b of the Wine Ordinance permits this term for Sekt b.A. too, provided the grapes come from vineyards with a gradient of at least 30%. Such sites are found mainly along the Mosel, Mittelrhein and Ahr, as well as in parts of the Rheingau, Franken and Württemberg.
The term describes labour, not a quality level. Steep vineyards see almost no machinery; harvesting is done by hand, and the effort per hectare is many times higher. This suits Sekt well, since hand-picking delivers whole, undamaged grapes. Even so, the word is no guarantee of a better Sekt—it simply tells the buyer where the grapes came from and under what conditions they were grown.
Vintage and grape variety: the 85 percent rule
Most Sekt wines carry no vintage at all. Producers blend base wines from several years to achieve the same style every time. If a year does appear on the label, EU law requires that at least 85% of the grapes were harvested in that year. The same threshold applies to a single grape variety. If two or more varieties are listed, they must together make up the entire wine and appear in descending order of their proportion.
Certain terms make this declaration mandatory. A Winzersekt must state both grape variety and vintage. Champagne has its own rules for vintage Champagne, including 36 months of ageing from bottling for the second fermentation, and there the vintage must even appear on the cork. The disgorgement date, however, remains voluntary—though many producers of bottle-fermented wines now include it. How to read it and what it reveals about a wine's maturity is covered in our journey through ageing.