German Catalog 2006 USE THIS ONE.qxp - Michael Skurnik Wines

PFALZ WINES
154
müller-catoir
pfalz • haardt
This was my final stop, and it was just Karen Odessa and me. Both Heinrich and Phillip
Catoir stayed with us for the entire tasting — I think it was their first run-through the entire vintage.
Martin Franzen was his usual genial self, and the wines were unsurprisingly gleaming.
2005 was a troublesome vintage in the Pfalz, but you wouldn’t know it to taste these.
That said, they are quite a bit more strong and correspondingly less chiseled than the supernal
04s. Boy, we sold out of them in a hurry (though you might still find a bottle here or there in the
gray-market). Things are shifting somewhat at Müller-Catoir, one senses. They joined the VDP.
They cultivate the press now — in the past they sometimes seemed like a Carthusian cloister to
which only the privileged gained access. Their private-customer business is a smaller proportion
of the total. Whereas they once appeared unconcerned
with any publicity they got, they’re now quite pleased.
Franzen’s “Wine Personality Of The Year” blurb was
delightedly received. And finally, the two of us have
reached a kind of ease which only arrives after many years.
My long-time customers are aware of my regard for
(and friendship with) Hans-Günter Schwarz, who was
Catoir’s cellarmaster for 42 years and who is nearly single-handedly
responsible for an entire generation of
enlightened German wine growers. He retired in 2002,
and Martin Franzen had some kind of shoes to fill. For a
while Schwarz’s name wasn’t spoken out loud, but now
the estate has made available small quantities of Hans-
Günter’s swansong-vintage 2001. These were tasted
alongside Franzen’s `05s with respect and appreciation.
A couple people I know share my very high regard
for the new era at Müller-Catoir, yet they often say “Of
course the wines are different now . . .” and this I don’t
entirely see. Naturally, Martin is his own man, but the
wines are recognizably Müller-Catoir wines. The vineyards,
after all, haven’t changed. The striving for the
outer limits of
expressiveness
hasn’t changed.
Martin Franzen
stands, like his
entire generation,
on the
shoulders of
Schwarz and
Catoir and the
pioneering
work they did
in the ‘60s, ‘70s
and ‘80s.
If the new
wines are different
these are
delicate differ-
Martin Franzen
ences, and it
•Vineyard area: 20 hectares
•Annual production: 11,250 cases
•Top sites: Haardter Bürgergarten and
Herzog, Gimmeldinger Mandelgarten,
Mussbacher Eselshaut
•Soil types: Loamy gravel, clay
•Grape varieties: 58% Riesling, 13% Rieslaner,
9% Scheurebe, 8% Weissburgunder, 4%
Muskateller, 3% Grauburgunder and
Spätburgunder, 2% other varieties
requires memory and imagination to delineate. After all,
we can’t know what wines Schwarz might have made
from the last few vintages; we can only infer theoretically.
Martin hails from the Mosel, and he’s certainly more
oriented to Riesling. His dry wines are a little drier. His
wines are a little leesier than Schwarz’s. His style seems
more flourescent, but I sense I am finding these things
only because I’m peering so intently for them.
The larger truth is: Müller-Catoir has resumed its
position at the top of the Pfalz and thus—at least—
among the greatest wineries in Germany.
Perhaps the stunning beauty and consistency of the
2004 collection was a sign of Martin’s settling in, or perhaps
it is a vintage whose parameters suited him. In either
case it is an achievement of great magnitude. One can
argue Martin’s performance in 2005 is even greater; the
vintage is so much more difficult. I think I’ll leave you
with a little anecdote. At dinner one evening at Luther,
we ordered a bottle of dry Riesling Spätlese from the `04
vintage from the most currently-fashionable estate in the
Pfalz. The wine was middling, and on a lark I ordered
Catoir’s dry `04 Bürgergarten Spätlese — the “regular”
one, not one of the micro-Crus — just to see if I was being