Prädikate and DAC
Germany and Austria: Prädikate and DAC
Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese: these words sound like sweetness, but they originally meant something quite different. Germany and Austria organise their quality wines through two different systems, one ancient, one not even thirty years old.
Germany's Prädikate: a ladder of sugar content
Germany's Prädikatswein system ranks wines by must weight, meaning the sugar content of the grapes right at harvest, measured in degrees Oechsle. The later and riper the harvest, the higher the value, and the higher the wine climbs on the ladder of Prädikate. At the bottom sits Kabinett, followed by Spätlese and Auslese, then the considerably rarer Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese. Eiswein forms its own category, because what counts for it isn't the time of harvest but the cold. In a single year, a winemaker can pick both a Kabinett in October and an Eiswein only in January of the following year, from the very same vineyard.
The exact minimum values in Oechsle differ depending on the grape variety and growing region. A Riesling from the Mosel needs different figures than a Silvaner from Franken. For Eiswein, a fixed physical rule applies instead of a sugar figure: the grapes must be frozen on the vine at minus seven degrees Celsius or colder and pressed in exactly that state. The ice stays behind in the press, while only the highly concentrated, sweet juice ends up in the glass.
Why a Prädikat reveals nothing about the sweetness in the glass
The most common misunderstanding about Prädikate: they describe the ripeness of the grape before fermentation, not the residual sugar in the finished wine afterward. A Kabinett can be made completely dry, as can a Spätlese, if the winemaker lets all the sugar ferment into alcohol. Only an addition like "trocken" (dry) or "feinherb" (off-dry) on the label reveals how sweet the bottle actually tastes in the end. Anyone who reads just the word Spätlese often expects a sweet wine. If a bone-dry Riesling ends up in the glass instead, the disappointment is understandably real.
Only at the very top levels, Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenauslese and Eiswein, is the sugar so extremely high that complete fermentation becomes practically impossible. These wines almost always remain naturally sweet, because the yeasts eventually choke on their own alcohol before all the sugar has been processed. With Kabinett, Spätlese and Auslese, by contrast, it's the cellar master alone who decides how far the fermentation is allowed to run.
The VDP: a second, voluntary ladder
Alongside the statutory Prädikat system, the Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter, or VDP, runs its own voluntary classification modelled on Burgundy. It ranks wines not by sugar content but by the site the grapes come from, across four tiers: Gutswein, Ortswein, Erste Lage and, at the top, Grosse Lage. Only member estates may use these terms; none of them is legally required. A winemaker outside the association can still produce outstanding wines from top sites. Even so, they may never write the term Grosse Lage on the label.
The dry-styled pinnacle of a Grosse Lage additionally carries the term Grosses Gewächs, often abbreviated as GG. This designation sits entirely alongside statutory law, rather like a private quality-seal organisation. For buyers, that means two parallel languages sometimes overlap on a single label, the statutory Prädikat level and the private vineyard classification, and both describe different things about the same wine.
Austria's DAC system: origin instead of a sugar figure
Since the early 2000s, Austria has increasingly organized its best wines according to a different principle: Districtus Austriae Controllatus, or DAC for short. Instead of sorting by ripeness, wines here are classified by region and typical style, similar to the French appellation system. There are now 18 such DAC regions, each with its own rules about which grape varieties and which taste profile are considered typical. Weinviertel DAC, for example, practically always stands for a spicy, peppery Grüner Veltliner.
Wines that fall outside these narrow rules may not carry the DAC designation. They then fall back into the more general Qualitätswein category, even if they come from the same region. At the same time, Austria still uses the same Prädikat terms as Germany for sweet and lusciously sweet wines, from Spätlese to Trockenbeerenauslese. So both systems run side by side: DAC for dry wines typical of their origin, and the old Prädikat system for the sweet elite.