Weingut Wittmann

The Free Bacchus Story

Rheinhessen spent decades as a byword for cheap German wine, and its rehabilitation took twenty years of work by a handful of estates. Wittmann was farming organically under Naturland certification from 1990 — several years before that renaissance began, and with no guarantee it ever would.

Philipp Wittmann later completed conversion to Demeter certified biodynamic practice on that foundation. The Westhofen vineyards, particularly the Kirchspiel and Aulerde Grosse Lagen, produce Riesling on limestone and loess rather than the Mosel's slate: broader and more textured, with the soil vitality translating vintage by vintage into wines that age far past what the region's old commercial reputation would lead anyone to expect.

Wittmann has said his parents took the organic certification in 1990 to keep the soils healthy and hand them on intact. Converting an estate for the benefit of a generation that has not arrived yet is a particular kind of decision.

The Kirchspiel Grosses Gewächs has drawn 98 points from James Suckling, and the full range of single-vineyard Grosses Gewächs bottlings has earned a following among German wine specialists that is disproportionate to how little is made.

This is an estate where the farming and the quality are connected so directly that explaining one largely explains the other, and where the farming came first, before anyone was watching.