“After the Wende,” he says, “people curbed their expectations and forgave us many mistakes.” Today he farms 9ha (22 acres) of vineyards, and the Muller-Thurgau is mostly gone, replaced by Riesling, Grauburgunder, Weissburgunder, and Traminer. Being able to label his Muller-Thurgau with the single site Meissner Kapitelberg, rather than the uniform wine of the co-op, ensured steady, growing sales. What Herrlich particularly remembers, however, is the goodwill of his customers. The purchase contract was 70 pages long, littered with conditions that would make profiteering easy and property speculation impossible: Bought vineyard land had to remain true to its purpose for the coming 15 years, and employees to cultivate it had to be hired. We evolved alongside the tax authorities, alongside the banks.” Bit by bit, he bought vineyards, also from the so-called Treuhand, the public agency established to privatize all the state-owned property of the defunct GDR. You needed your amtliche Prufnummer, but it didn’t exist. “From today’s perspective, these were simple times,” says Herrlich. All the individuality that characterizes a wine landscape was gone.” Recognizing that the Wende (turnaround) - the fundamental political change - was a time to act, he refounded the family firm in 1990, initially keeping his job at Wackerbarth. “Just give me 40 years to raze all the estates in the Mosel and put one giant winery in the middle. The state-owned co-op in Meissen made just one wine: Muller-Thurgau,” he remembers. Closer to home, there was just the co-op: “There was simply no diversity. Being unable to study enology or viticulture, he read food chemistry instead and became cellar master at the state-owned Schloss Wackerbarth in nearby Radebeul, which pumped out high volumes of indifferent, socialist Sekt. Herrlich had been apprenticed as a Winzer (vintner) in the former GDR. His family had owned Meissen vineyards since 1873, but in 1989 they had just half a hectare (one acre). “We just thought, Let’s go for it,” says Thomas Herrlich, owner of Weingut Vincenz Richter in Meissen, a small town on the River Elbe 30km (19 miles) northwest of Dresden, long famous for its porcelain and wines.
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