Weingut Ökonomierat Rebholz

The Free Bacchus Story

Biodynamics asks a grower to do things no laboratory has fully explained, and most estates that take it up either over-claim the science or go quiet about the parts they cannot justify. Hansjörg Rebholz does neither. Asked about it he says you cannot explain everything scientifically, and that you do not have to.

The estate sits at Siebeldingen in the Pfalz and has been in the family for three generations, long enough that the way it farms is a house habit rather than a recent decision. It is a member of respekt-BIODYN, the association of biodynamic growers across Germany, Austria and northern Italy, which requires EU organic certification of everyone it admits.

If German wine is unfamiliar ground, the Pfalz is a forgiving place to begin. It is one of the warmer parts of a cool country, so the Rieslings ripen with a little more flesh on them than the featherweight bottles from the Mosel further north, and the region also does well with the Burgundian whites. The house style across serious German estates now is dry: high acid, low alcohol, citrus and stone rather than oak and sweetness.

That dryness is the thing most people get wrong about German wine. The sweet supermarket bottles that gave the country its reputation abroad came from the same grape, and undoing that association has taken the best growers decades.

What we can confirm here is membership, checked against the association's published list rather than taken from the estate. The EU organic certificate number is not recorded yet, and neither is a flagship bottling or a price. Those go in when they are confirmed.