Müller-Ruprecht "Blanc de Noir" Rosé, Pfalz, Germany 2024

FROM VOM BODEN:

THE WINE: This is an estate KP Keller introduced us to in 2020 and we took a small flyer on the rosé last year, based solely on the extreme cut of the basic Riesling and, well, we were blown away. This is from the limestone Pfalz, where Pinot Noir does quite well. We’ve secured a bit more of this for 2022 and we expect fireworks.

If you haven’t heard of Frühburgunder it is an early ripening, delicate and elegant cousin to Pinot Noir. A very soft crushing to not get too much color, with as little skin contact as possible to make it ultra light. Very aromatic, soaring red fruit, lots of citrus, a salty minerality.

THE PRODUCER: Müller-Ruprecht presents the sharper, perhaps more electric side of Saumagen, in the northern Pfalz. On more than one occasion Müller-Ruprecht’s single-vineyard “basic” bottling from the Annaberg has reminded me of Weiser-Künstler’s estate Feinherb, that hallowed lime-zest salt-lick of a Mosel wine. (A few other people, including Joe Beddia of Pizzeria Beddia, have been wildly impressed by the wine, inspiring his label for the bottling, reproduced to the right. And, in full circle, Keller posted on Instagram drinking the “Kabinett Trocken” in good company.) To shape a wine of such freshness in the Pfalz is… well, extraordinary. The wines in a way seem to contain this family energy, this kinetic, joyous movement, like atomic particles all flying around with big grins on their faces.

The effortlessly drinkable, crystalline, shimmering and clean trilogy of what I guess you’d call “natural” bottlings are just uplifting – figuratively and literally. Here are wines that have a juicy immediacy, a vibrant zingy-ness that reads as what it actually is: just a cool-climate growing happy grapes, and from these happy grapes, happy wines. Happiness seems to be something of a meta-theme here.