Weingut A. Christmann

The Free Bacchus Story

Steffen Christmann spent years as president of the VDP, the body that decides which German estates count among the country's best. He had already turned his own vineyards biodynamic in 2003, four years before respekt-BIODYN existed to certify anyone for doing it. He was setting the rules with one hand and going out ahead of them with the other.

If your idea of German wine is something sweet in a tall blue bottle, the last thirty years have happened without you. What serious growers here stake their names on is bone dry: high acid, alcohol usually under thirteen per cent, and a flavour nearer to lime and wet stone than to oak. The Pfalz sits on the warm side of that, along the eastern flank of the Haardt hills, far enough south that its Rieslings carry a little flesh the featherweights of the Mosel never do. Christmann farms seventeen hectares of it in the Mittelhaardt, the stretch that has always been the best address in the region — three-quarters Riesling, and most of the rest given to the Pinot family, which Germany grows far better than it gets credit for.

Idig, at Königsbach, is the vineyard the house is known for, and its wine goes out as a Grosses Gewächs: the VDP's mark for a dry wine off a classified site, grand cru in everything but the word. Christmann helped write that classification. He also has to put his own bottles through it, which is a less comfortable arrangement than it sounds.

Down in the cellar the sulphur addition is chalked on the head of every cask, forty parts per million, where anyone walking past can read it. Nobody made him do that. The organic certificate underneath it is registry-verified in the EU's own TRACES system, and respekt-BIODYN will not take a grower who does not already hold one — but the chalk is the better tell. It is what a house looks like when it has stopped treating the standard as something to clear and started treating it as how the work is done.