Wine

The sun beats down hotly from the sky. Shimmering, dazzling light, blazing oven heat, and an almost audible silence. In ancient times, the landscape of the Palatinate resembles the stony deserts of California’s Death Valley or Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Digging through the vineyards in the “Birkweiler Kastanienbusch” today, one can see sediments from this unique era of geological history. Conglomerates in dark red and violet colors can be found, as well as sand and claystones from the Rotliegendes. This is among the oldest rocks in the Palatinate. Vineyards with this terroir are now considered to be among the top locations.

These wines, which are very well-aged, powerful, multifaceted, and elegant, are predominantly composed of mineral, smoky tones and delicate honeydew melon aromas.

Twenty to 25 million years ago, the Palatinate region tasted neither of wine nor chestnuts. Rather, the air was filled with a maritime salty scent. The tropical sea penetrating from the south caused the Palatinate’s limestone reefs to grow ever higher.

As the sea receded, limestone mud remained, which, like the reef limestone, solidified into limestone. The porous and richly interspaced limestone rocks can store large amounts of water. They contain abundant magnesium and calcium.

The limestone has a very positive effect on the taste of the wine. The warm soils lend the aromas soft notes, and the limestone buffers the acidity excellently.

The soil from which the Romans fired their bricks. Clay and limestone marl is a mixture of clay-rich loam and lime, which, due to its fine-grained structure, can neither absorb nor permeate water.

Over the course of Earth’s history, it was deposited at various times during the more tropical marine phases. Due to their basic saturation with nutrients, marl soils no longer required additional lime.

Marl soils give wines a dense, mineral-accented, and complex flavor profile.

During the formation of the loess soils, during the Limestone Period of the Pleistocene, life in the Palatinate was certainly not as pleasant as it is today. Icy storms blew up fine-pored clouds of dust from the gravel plains of rivers and the terminal moraines of glaciers, sweeping them hundreds of kilometers through the air.

Only many millennia later, when the lime-rich dust had long since settled on the ground and the climate had warmed, did these storm clouds prove to be a blessing. Almost half of our vineyards are covered with this 10-15 meter thick layer of sediment. These mineral-rich soils produce powerful, full-bodied wines.

Our Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris, as well as our Merlot, thrive on the loess.

Soils made of shell limestone are not entirely without problems for vines. Because the soil is quite stony, the vines have to work particularly hard to access nutrients. This allows the vines to develop a very strong root system and ultimately produce wines with particularly distinctive character.

Shell limestone is also a good heat storage agent, as it can quickly absorb sunlight and release it very slowly. The high clay content of the soil, in turn, provides the vines with ideal nutrients. This produces mineral wines with high extract.