The Markgräferland is, together with the Bodensee, the southernmost part of Baden. The soils here are predominantly limestone, which is immediately suggestive of a kinship with Burgundy, especially as there are remarkable climatic similarities between the two regions. Hanspeter Ziereisen is a huge personality whom everyone seems to know. He and his endlessly good-humoured wife, Edeltraud, preside over a compact domaine with an influence out of proportion to its size. He makes wines in a resolutely individual way, having long ago given up the notion of conforming to the straitened mind-set of the local wine authorities. Consequently, most of them are not submitted for approval as AO Baden wines, but rather are sold as lowly “regional” wines – albeit the most expensive of them are amongst the dearest wines of Germany. Call this the “Sassicaia Syndrome”. Without subscribing to the strictest dogmas of “Natural” wine, Ziereisen’s products can be described as nothing but. All vineyard work is manual, all oak barrels are local, no chemicals are employed in the vineyards, fermentations are spontaneous, no wines are filtered and everything is given time to relax on the lees before bottling and in the bottle before release – even if this runs counter to the cycles of the commercial clock. Each product is given a fanciful name in the local dialect, which is strongly influenced by the strange sonorities spoken across the border in Switzerland. Welcome to the wacky world of Ziereisen. slides down the throat as easily a hot knife slices through butter.