The Pfalz – Not False – Promise of 2018

BY DAVID SCHILDKNECHT | MARCH 16, 2021

Vintage 2018 is not a show-stopper for Pfalz Riesling. Nor are the wines likely to go down in history for their longevity. Yet, it isn’t just an eminently appealing vintage, it’s also one of enormous promise, not just for the Pfalz, but for what it says about where German Riesling as a whole could be headed. 

Thanks to the work of Christmann and Müller-Catoir, the largely gentle but in part terraced slopes of Gimmeldingen are enjoying renewed recognition.

At Once Ominous and Promising 

When I reported on vintage 2017 in the Pfalz, I chose as one of my subheadings “Ominous Viticultural Horizons,” pointing out that, as Germany’s warmest Riesling-dominated region, the Pfalz faced “especially acute” worries and challenges in the face of climate change.

In late August 2018, when I tasted von Bassermann-Jordan’s legendary Forster Ungeheuer Riesling from the record-settingly precocious harvest of “Comet Year” 1811, I could not fail to note both near incredulity and slight apprehension, at how closely reports from the surrounding vineyards resembled those of 1811. On September 8 of the same year proprietor Andreas Jordan recorded in his diary: “grapes already completely ripe.” In fact, by the end of August 2018, most Pfalz estates had already commenced the earliest harvest in their histories, including of Riesling at any addresses that hoped to render Riesling Sekt. Not that long-time Bollinger chef de cave Matthieu Kauffmann – at the time presiding as cellarmaster over an unprecedentedly ambitious sparkling wine program at Reichsrat von Buhl – was expecting 2018’s abundance of fruit to translate into copious base wine for that purpose. Acid levels were already too low and, even more importantly in Kauffmann’s estimation, sugar levels too high. It seemed that 2018 was destined to be a year in which Pfalz growers could do no better than fight the effects of heat and drought to a standoff and settle for relatively soft, voluminous Rieslings that would hopefully avoid being blowsy or conspicuously alcoholic.

Instead, in the hands of top Pfalz practitioners, the 2018 growing season, while suboptimal for Sekt, yielded rich and concentrated, yet, by and large, animating and refreshing Rieslings, spirited but seldom spiritous. It could be done, even in the face of freakish precocity, summer drought, and near-endless sunshine! But then, it was precocity of bud-break and flowering (which was almost too perfect) that guaranteed grapes harvested at the beginning of September would have enjoyed more than the proverbial hundred days on the vine. Meanwhile, heat and drought led to late-summer vine shutdown that sometimes translated into advantageously later picking dates at higher acidity and lower sugar than many growers had initially anticipated. The abundance of fruit in 2018 could conceivably also have exercised a positive restraint on sugar accumulation. But then, experience at Bürklin-Wolf suggests that drastic selectivity was sometimes necessary in the face of large quantities. In cellarmaster Nicola Libelli’s telling, “the high yields, and the strain that large crop loads placed on the vines” left a significant share of that crop subpar by Bürklin-Wolf’s high expectations. But it also left a volume of eventual wines that are normal by long-term standards, and one featuring quality that on occasion approaches the sublime. None of the many 2018 successes, I hasten to add, would have been possible were it not for an extremely well-watered late winter. Had the 2018 growing season been preceded by 2019’s or 2020’s paucity of winter precipitation, things could not possibly have gone as smoothly as they did.