A. Christmann, Pfalz, Germany

Christmann

Steffen Christmann has a dog named Lola. Her presence made me feel my heart, warm and soft in my chest. I'd traveled a quarter of the way around the globe and hadn't slept yet: it was mid-day in Germany but still the early morning after a sleepless night in the time of my homeland. I would be awake for twelve more hours. Weingut A. Christmann was the first winery I'd visit on a long trip through Europe, and I was greeted at its door by a scruffy amiable old mutt, similar in demeanor and appearance to the one I'd left home without. This was a bit of joy and a good omen on all the business to come.

I tried to focus my fuzzy vision on the place. It was a hazy grey day, not cool or hot. I stood in Lola's courtyard made of clean white walls and damp vibrant spring green almond trees. It was my first day in the Pfalz, and I didn't know what the place would look like. The town was unexceptionally pretty, the landscape rolling and green but not dramatic. For me the Pfalz remained a mostly blank page. Late in our visit Steffen's father took us to a high overlook above their village of Gimmeldingen to improve our sense of the Pfalz. OK, that's France off to our right, not very far away at all. 40km. A ruined castle perched near the vines marked the border until 1835. And the continuous belt of city and industry that spins out most of the new Germany's wealth was mercifully barely beyond view to our left, though I'm certain it would be an orange glow at night. Hard to imagine on this breezy afternoon, with a agrarian elder statesman shepherding us about, that at the edge of his pastoral world begins the grey economy of Mannheim, Frankfurt, Koln. The most densely-populated area of Europe begins on the horizon. In the foreground are only old Riesling vines, stone churches, Lola pooping in the tall grasses of Christmann's organic vineyard. This inevitable action visibly irritated Steffen's father. My taking a picture of the dog pooping in the vineyard irritated him more. It was worth it: it's a really funny picture.

If you are brave, try to drink a lot of Riesling in an advanced stage of sleep deprivation and then fight the urge to make repeated off-color jokes based on the word Gimmeldingen, which people are of course using incessantly. Because it's where you are. In Gimmeldingen. Letlag + glass of wine and a big meal = IQ of an 11-year-old. Christmann's vines are all organic, and each row has attached to it "sexual confusion devices" to remove the threat of certain predatory insects. Chuckle.

There is a deliberate modern minimal feel to the tasting room at Weingut A. Christmann. A few large pieces of art, carefully displayed strata of the region's soil, a long wooden tasting table with expensive handblown Austrian glasses and spit buckets. A frequently encountered object in my life is the expensive spit bucket, carefully designed to be simultaneously fully functional and a little shy about its purpose. Christmann's were made of an almost obaque graphite/black glass, and were relatively curvy and small. Vase-like, not practical for a big event but I'm sure always ample to retain the volume of once-tasted wine generated during private meetings between Steffen and clients in this intimate space. And of course the spit went away through come sort of lid akin to a fast-food sneeze guard, designed to reduce revulsion, and splash-back.

Weingut A Christmann may not be big (130,000 bottles annually is modest) but Steffen is a big deal. He is the head of the VDP, the biggest and most important consortium of quality-minded wine growers in Germany. If the reader of this is lucky enough to be earning a living outside of the wine trade, I should emphasize that head of the VDP makes you a figure of considerable power. He must be something of a political being to ascend to this post. The VDP holds sway over a cloud of contentious issues. As a group of considerable prestige, entrance to or exclusion from the organization can create storms of anger and gossip and public reprisals. Members of the VDP are of course very diverse in their size, methods and goals. Inevitably the group wishes to pull in many directions at once.

Steffen seemed to wear this stress well. He did have to rush to the airport straight from our lunch and tasting (hence the father being shuffled onto the stage for the walkabout kick-the-vines portion of our visit. But he was kind enough to have scheduled a (billed as) light lunch at the on-premise restaurant before our tasting began. Little mercies. The lunch was good, pike and a leafy salad. Light is wasn't, the fish being of the secret-butter type commonly found in fancy restaurants. How could a pretty little circle of fish make me feel so full... undoubtedly a day's dose of dairy hidden in its flesh. At the time I felt duped and a little drugged; as my visits across Germany and Austria began to run together it became clear that this was by local standards a light meal. But that's another story.

After lunch we trudged back across the courtyard to the previously described tasting room / spittin' saloon, to conduct a little proper business. Here's a summary of the best of what we tasted.

2007 Konigsbach SC Riesling The forest behind Gimmeldingen protects this area from bad weather, as does its 400 meter-high hills. This entry-level wine is certainly worth buying, a very auspicious start to the tasting.

09 Pfalz Riesling - Very pretty and concentrated fruit aromas. Pfalz peach in the foreground. All wild yeast. Biodynamic for nine years. 12% alcohol. Some young fruit aroma, akin to watermelon. Sandstone soils impart the apricot/peach aroma.

09 Deidesheimer Paradiesgarten Riesling - Intense oily waxy aroma. Almost over-the-top ripe aroma. Dry finish. Clean, pure mineral on the long finish.

09 Gimmeldinger Biengarten Riesling - More bones less opulent fruit. I enjoy it more at this point in time. Perfect mouthfeel, open and airy with a long mineral finish. 1/2-1 star. Buy.

I have a highly arbitrary star system in my personal notes. About 5% of wines get 1/2 star, and there's a roughly 50% chance I'll buy them if they clear this hurdle. Maybe 1/2 of a percent of wines get one star, and I usually buy them. Once in a blue moon a wine get more than a star, and maybe 3-5 times in the last decade I've gone as far as using two stars, denoting the wine to be a totally transcendent, uniquely mindblowingly awesome delicious wine.

08 Idig GC Riesling Brings to mind Alsatian Grand Crus. Limestone soils. Large barrel. Good palate feel. Enough mineral. Toes the line of too much alchohol but stays fine.

07 Idig GC Riesling - This has more ripe fruit opulence and a bit of petrol aroma. Clean finish, not too alcoholic.

09 Idig GC Rielsing tank sample - Very pleasant.

09 Pfalz Spatburgunder - Very concentrated berry fruit aroma. Going through malo at present. From barrel. Will be bottled in two years. They use very small berries to give tannic structure. Chocolatey full texture. Pretty delicious in the cellar. The do not inoculate for malo.

09 St. Laurent - Wild exotic berry fruit aromas. Brambly. Baking spices. St. Laurent got its name from the saint's day it used to be harvested on. From barrel. Going through malo. Some pure maraschino cherry aroma. Bringht acidity. Pure. 1/2 star.

08 Spatburgunder Pfalz Lean wild fruit aroma. Dry, Alsatian. Lean, not sweet fruit.

07 Spatburgunder Konigsberger Olberg. Harmonious and easy in its appeal.

Wine From the Danube

Wine from the Danube

I create an impenetrable fortification of logic before I travel abroad on wine business. I have to the survive the weeks of, "Oh, fancy that, a business trip to Austria. Well, we hope you don't suffer too much, enjoy the vacation etc." I line up the reasons. Wine tastes better on the banks of the Danube, the schnitzel in my office is terrible, how do you expect me to sell Federspiel when I've never seen Federspiel in flight over the vines of the Wachau.... I kid, clearly there are many legitimate reasons to meet the people whose wine we decide to sell, and to walk through their vineyards and cellars. I get to poke stuff, ask questions, play the dumb American to full effect. I wear white sneakers to disarm my hosts, and also maybe to blind them. "Why's it so cold in here? Wow, those vines sure do look old. What's that bubbling sound?" It's a brilliant interrogation technique that I'm pretty certain Europeans dismiss as provincial ignorance, humoring me and patiently spilling the beans regarding the sordid ins-and-outs of their estates. Ok, I get little dirt. But I do dredge up enough morsels of fact to cram into infinite versions of this prose. And that is worth enduring coach class discomfort, and the high probability of developing gout. The winemakers I visit seem to deploy cured meat as a weapon, or a winnowing device. "Are you serious about selling my wine? Then step up to the plate and scarf down a second helping of lardo. My wife made it. I raised the pigs myself." No is not an option, even if at times the (I'm sure earnest) hospitality can be deliciously painful.

I never knew the scale of the heart of Austrian wine country until we were driving north, our car pointed directly at the Wagram. Even on a foggy, rainy day it was possible to see clearly all the important grape growing regions along the Danube, spread out to our car's left in relatively neat divisions: Wachau, Kamptal, Kremstal. My topographic map of this region is now set in stone, a sureness about their scale and position that a decade of book learnin' had failed to cement.

A wider, basically sea-sized prehistoric Danube created the character of Donauland (the old name for the sum of these regions), and made the wines that grow on its old banks taste as they do. Much later in the slow march of geologic time, great masses of wind-propelled loess blew down from the alps to coat this part of Austria, creating a unique topsoil so fine that its individual particles can only be seen with the aid of a microscope. I believed I knew what loess was. It is a big deal soil type, always mentioned in a general discussion of the peculiarities of Austrian wines, specifically Gruner Veltliner. But standing in front of the exposed 10-meter-high wall of loess that confronted me when I walked into a Donauland vineyard for the first time, and rubbing this stuff between my fingers that felt like very fine cake flour and essentially disappeared from my hands, it became clear that my knowledge of Austrian vineyards was at best abstract and also fairly incomplete.

Leaving for a foreign country for over a week does feel like an indulgence. Hundreds of the moments described above pile up (like loess settling on primary rock, if you enjoy extraneous simile piled upon simile) to make for a very meaningful travel experience. A related geologic aside: I now fully understand how quartz shaped the course to the Rhine. I know I've read the dull details, but standing where the ancient river met unmoveable primary rock and was forced away, to bore through softer sedimentary stuff upstream, it all seems suddenly very interesting. If school could be all field experience maybe I would have majored in Geology.

Let's leave rocks behind. People take the vines they were born to and shape them as much as weather and soil allow. I got to stand (in the rain, as always) in the most well-regarded expanse of vineyard in the Kamptal, next to a patch of scruffy old vines farmed for Ludwig Hiedler by an ancient farmer from whom Ludwig hopes to purchase the field some day. It is a small patch, probably smaller than your front yard. The Kamptal sloped gently away from us toward the Danube, all its key players in view. Brundlmeyer's holdings surrounded us. The workers of Schloss Gobbelsberg were busy pruning, for a few more minutes at least as the rain came down in threatening waves. I stood surrounded by vines that produce wines that we sell. The differences in these wines spread out around me, easy to see. A stack of books and tasting notes would not explain it, but one hour on a hillside and the immutable logic of farming was clear, in focus. Thanks to a cold slog and a good guide I'll take to my grave a pretty good sense of the flavors this distinct territory is capable of producing.

A related postscript. It's amazing how flat the revered Lamm vineyard is, stretching out in front of the real slope in a pretty sunny place. The grade is totally contrary to our stereotype of a Grand Cru, which makes me think the drainage and aspect to the sun must be perfect. Experience on the ground both confirms suspicions and raises new questions. Hopefully the answers motivate me to buy better wine for us to drink back at home. That's the plan.

Thorsten Melsheimer is a giant. He looks like a rugby player. He looks like a guy who could pull trees (or grapevines) right from the earth with his bare hands. He lives in the village of Reil, a hamlet nestled into the narrow northern Mosel, as far as I can tell the prettiest part of southwestern Germany. His surroundings magnify the impression that Thorsten is a mythical force that lumbered in from the wilderness, stepping over hillsides and knocking together the skulls of people that got in his way.



Nice guy, though. Thank god. He could do some damage. Soft spoken, with a finely developed and slightly black sense of humor. He is a man that cannot be extricated from his environment. Our travels with Thorsten began in a dark, wood-paneled tasting room whose walls were covered in huge trophy antlers. Five generations ago his family became winemakers: before they were professional hunters. Later, in the farcically damp, dark and low-ceillinged cellar under his home, it became clear that the man is ensconced in a place that could be a movie set environmental representation of his physical and intellectual character. The cellar is a classic old-style space with mold on every surface, a cellar constructed entirely from wood and stone where hopefully Thorsten works wearing a hard-hat. Centuries old, nevertheless it seemed built around him.



Hiking a tiny vineyard road to the top of the Mullay Hofberg, as smaller men (employees) struggled to pull baskets full of rocks up a vineyard with a 60+ degree grade as cool fog rolled over northern hills to blanket thousands of staked Riesling vines, it was perfectly clear that the biology and character of Thorsten are hewn from necessity. I would be hesitant to walk through much less work in these perilous vineyards. This place made Thorsten Melsheimer, and in return he maintains it as a viable entity in a slowly vanishing landscape. His dark humor, wry smile and even demeanor are constructed to weather the facts. Thorsten does not believe what he does is necessarily viable. He makes organic wine from the best, steeply terraced vineyards above Reil. This is brutally slow and labor intensive. He needs 14 workers to harvest 1,800 bottles of wine per day from his vineyards, meticulously making selections and sub-selections of the best fruit. In 1970 the Melsheimer estate was 5 hectares farmed by 12 full-time, year-round workers. Today it is 12 hectares and Thorsten is the only full-time laborer, with seasonal help added as needed when it can be afforded. He charges more than neighboring estates that farm conventionally, or work in the relatively flat fields on the "wrong side" of the Mosel. He is quietly unmovable from a course that leads to truly excellent and deeply, essentially German wines.



But Thorsten does express chagrin at the deception and unfairness in today's German marketplace. Some of his peers even use pictures of Melsheimer's immaculate, terraced and vertigo-inspiring vineyards to promote sales of their wines grown around Reil. They undercut his prices and take an easier path, one that he fears ultimately unwinds the reputation for quality that was always assigned to the wines of his native land. What is the source of his pessimism? What is at stake? In 1970 there were 70 wineries in Reil. Today there are 20, and Thorsten believes one-third of those remaining will not be passed down to the next generation. Great sites have been abandoned. Which is fuel for Melsheimer, who already has plans to rehabilitate another outstanding, unworked vineyard high above his home. But as important vineyards are forgotten, the unique beauty of this place becomes fainter.



As time ran out on the first day of the visit to Melsheimer, after tasting from seemingly every 1000 liter wooden barrel in the very cold and wet underground and seeing all the prefunctory checklist items on a standard professional (probably amateur, too) winery tour (arcane equipment, very old bottles to ooh-aah over, esoteric distillates) we sat around a kitchen table, quietly munching local venison sausage at the beginning of what would become a week-long unrelenting charcouterie fest. And we tasted Melsheimer's bottled wines. Dry, half-dry, sweet: everything was true and honest, simply good. Real. His great site is the Reiler Mullay Hofberg, and several older sub-parcel bottlings are worth trying, particularly the Pfefferberg.



The next morning we walked to the top of the Hofberg and tasted Melsheimer's dessert wines. These wines are good in the morning, even if drinking them is colored by a sadness at how utterly non-commercial they are. Their beauty stands outside of any sort of typical mercantile relationship. Put another way: I am glad Thorsten allows these wines to be exactly as they are. I have emotional desire to sell them, and drink them. But there is no real commerce around Trockenbeerenauslese harvested with 380 grams of residual sugar (38% of the wine is sugar) and 12 grams per liter of total acidity. Watching the Mosel go by on a foggy morning in May, the wine is utterly perfect.



Go visit. The guest house is beautifully old-world and uneven, a winding collection of rooms apparently designed by a team of smurf architects. It is the Mosel at its best, a sleepy, comfortable dwelling surrounded by winding stone streets and innumerable possibilities for hiking, biking, floating down the river.... And Thorsten's wines are perfect refreshments for a mid-day picnic during your excursions.