2021 Riesling Basalt

The Odinstal estate is an idyll, a lovely, isolated manor house looking down at its vineyards that sit high above the village of Forst, just below the forest in the Haardt hills. Wine has been made here for 200 years when Johann Ludwig Wolf, then mayor, cleared the forest and terraced the land. His contemporaries thought this was absurd and thought grapes would never ripen at this altitude, but he proved them wrong with earlier-ripening Gewürztraminer. His vines, however, are long gone. When the Hensel family bought the land and revived the estate in 2004, the locals said exactly the same. Previous to that, Odinstal belonged to a local estate that used to make Landwein, in this case really the simplest wine. [N.B. today, Landwein often denotes very good wines that refuse to comply with the legal framework.] Winemaker Andreas Schumann has been on board since 2004 and farms the 5.2 hectares at Odinstal plus a small 0.6-hectare parcel in the Deidesheimer Nonnenstück in the valley. Earlier this year, the estate bought a further 5.2 hectares in Herxheim, but the wine has not come on stream yet. The estate is certified biodynamic and comprises 7 hectares of forest and 4 hectares of meadowland, which are maintained as biotopes. The wines are marked by their extended aging on lees, and all come with inherent, yeasty, stony saltiness.