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

PFALZ WINES
174
Well, guess again. Other Philippi principles include no
cultured yeasts, and none but the “classical” Geisenheim
clones of Riesling. He likes alcohol and body and
Nietzschean thunder in his wines. He doesn’t like sweetness,
and even his wines with residual sugar are on the
dry side. Left to his own devices he’d drink nothing but
dry wines.
Which is a pity, at least to me, because good though
many of the dry wines are, even a modicum of sweetness
often elevates them; really profound now, not just voluminous,
with gut-grabbing flavors of ginger, dough and
maize. These stand as the antonym of the current trend
toward reductive vinification which—you may have
noticed—I happen to like. But the world would be a much
poorer place without wines like these, great charging
bears, with all manner of woodsy, animal secondary flavors,
yet supported by a rigid acid skeleton and capable
of amazing aging.
I don’t think Bernd would quarrel with any of that,
yet I do detect a change of sorts in these wines, and I
don’t know if it’s the recent vintages, the current cellarmaster
or a change Bernd himself desires and has
brought about. The wines have all the weight they
always did, yet they seem silkier somehow, less rugged.
Even as Bernd himself continues to chart new territory
in egregious debauchery his wines become more and
more refined. I like to tease Bernd—he’s such an easy
target—but in fact I respect him hugely for not becoming
his own caricature, and for steering his wines to everdeepening
finesse.
In many opinions the leading estate of the
koehler-ruprecht at a glance:
Pfalz — certainly among the top five. Of
those estates, these are the biggest, most massively scaled wines. Extraordinarily
old-style approach to vinification: no stainless steel. On an incredible roll the past
several vintages.
They are uncompromisingly stony-gingery, dense,
how the wines taste:
wine-y, not at all grapey. They tend to polarize tasters; if
you love them they give you something you almost can’t get anywhere else: a warmly
satisfying old-fashioned bigness of flavor that’s masculine and lusty. Other tasters just
don’t “see” them, as they lack the modern steely brilliance. Bernd’s grudgingly willing
to concede that the reductive style makes friends but in his heart he finds that type of
wine too sterile and simple, and lacking the capacity to age. That being said, in recent
vintages I sense a slow movement toward a more classical profile for many of Bernd’s
wines, perhaps as his own palate becomes more demanding. Bernd routinely makes
elite-quality wines; in most tastings of Pfalz wines his are in the top group. I myself
reach for them frequently and find they give that little extra that great wines give. If
you don’t know these you owe it to yourself to check them out, ESPECIALLY IF YOU
BUY FOR A RESTAURANT, as these are among the most food-friendly wines of any in
this vast universe of possibility.
GKR-094 2001 Kallstadter Saumagen Riesling Auslese Trocken “R” +
First release, and in fact it won’t be released until 2007, but ten cases are allocated to
the United States, and may I suggest you sign up for them now? This is one of
Germany’s most remarkable dry Rieslings; a wonderfully smoky, root-veggie nose . . .
campfire, toasted pine-nut; many-dimensional intricacy; as limey-minerally as
Alzinger’s Steinertal and as dense and bready as Jamek’s Klaus, yet racy as the `01s are.
It does quite a textural dance: stone, gelatin, snap, muscle.
SOS: 0 (8-25 years)