Hammelmann’s vineyards are only good for onions and potatoes.
At least that was the refrain, most likely said with more than a touch of disdain, for the cold, flat, wind-swept Rhein basin of the Pfalz, where Hammelmannn grew up. Zeiskam is the name of the town. You’ve never heard of it, I’d guess. We hadn’t either.
Regardless: Much of what Lukas heard growing up was this quip about Zeiskam and its onions and potatoes.
Zeiskam was nothing more than potato-berg. For that “good” wine, well, you had to go twenty minutes west, to Rebholz’s southfacing sites, warmer and sheltered in the Haardt hills. Or, better yet, for that aristocratic juice you had to drive a half-hour north to the famed “Mittelhaardt,” to the towns of Bad Dürkheim, Forst and Deidesheim. For the American wine love, I think the stature of the middle Pfalz eludes us, with its wealth and pomp. The central Pfalz, what the Germans call the “Mittelhaardt,” is something like the Germanic Napa Valley. There are grand estates and manicured lawns and shiny cars driven by people with expensive taste in eyewear.
There are a lot of “vons” here – the aristocrats. More than a few investor-types have invested money here, the new cash bulking up the old money.
For a German, the middle Pfalz is fancy and when you come from the periphery of the Pfalz itself, there is something of a divide. The Mittelhaardt is for wines of breed and distinction and Zeiskam is for onions and potatoes. These are just lines you don’t cross.
Until someone like Lukas Hammelmann comes along and says something like: “Fuck you, line.”
I first tasted Lukas’ 2019ers in the summer of 2020, when all I did was receive pallets of wine from Europe and taste them alone in my kitchen. Goddamn that summer of never-ending quarantine. I tasted so many – so many – bottles that year, samples sent from everywhere in Germany. Many were forgettable; that’s just how it is in this business.
But I never, ever forgot Lukas’ wines.
They made such an impression on me that I went to visit him in August of 2021, while COVID was spiking. I just couldn’t wait. I have since tasted nearly five vintages and with each passing year I am just as startled, just as invigorated, just as blown away and even more confident than I was years ago that Lukas is a rare and blazing talent.
The Rieslings are absolutely screeching and blaze across the palate with raw citrus, green herbs and a bone-chilling acidity (more than one taster has confused Hammelmann’s wines with the Mosel). These wines rip.
They are ruthless and in the first months as I tasted them they reminded me quite a bit of Schäfer-Fröhlich, though Hammelmann’s wines are perhaps punchier, more rustic and raw. While Hammelmann direct-presses, preserving the fierce acidities, most of the wines are aged in oak barrels, many of which are on the newer side. This is not an aesthetic choice – he’s not looking for oaked Rieslings – he simply wants very specific barrels and he wants to know the provenance. This one can only do with new barrels. Yet the combination of this ultra-high-toned fruit (raw citrus, lime zest, orange oils) and the subtle undercurrent of wood creates an effect that is minty and herbal. I find it incredibly appealing. Most of the Rieslings are bottled unfined and unfiltered so they can have a saline, leesy quality. I also find this incredibly appealing.
Either way, the style is singular. These wines are unique to Hammelmann, unique in the Pfalz. Maybe you like them, maybe they are too much for you, regardless the quality is indisputable.
So the question, then, is this: How in the hell are these wines so good?
According to the VDP map above, all the “famous sites” are to the west, up into the Haardt mountains – all those purple and red squares. Not only are there no vineyards of note around Zeiskam (which you can see listed to the right of the green “Pfalz” in the center of the image), the area isn’t even highlighted green. The VDP map shows it all as a part of that unpleasant industrial gray; it doesn’t even look like there’s a damn green lawn in the town. (Fact: I have been there and there are plenty of lawns and vineyards.)
In many ways, it makes no sense.
Yet in other ways it makes perfect sense. Lukas has said these site, these two neighboring villages (his hometown of Zeiskam and then Hochstadt, directly west) were historically too cool for great viticulture. We’ll discuss the confusing microclimates in a bit, but this is a trend we’re seeing all over the world: sites once too cold are now in the zone.
That said, I do think that for Hammelmann there are two other factors at play, both of them entwined within the other: determination and originality.
First, Lukas is just something of a force. I don’t think he’d have been able to accomplish what he has accomplished without simply willing it to be. Even the way he speaks; he says things he believes as if they are a well-known fact that you should have already known. He believes Zeiskam was overlooked and ridiculed by people. He believes the terroir could be great… and now somehow it is.
Second, originality: In many places in Germany (or any old and famous winemaking culture) there is the tendency to copy, to emulate. I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense. Very often such emulation is a reflection of a belief in a Platonic ideal, or a respect for tradition.
Hammelmann, for better or worse, is so completely on his own path that reference points for the first-time taster are hard. As I mentioned, there is something of the force of Schäfer-Fröhlich (whom Hammelmann very much likes), something of the glaze and power of a more traditional Pfalz winery (say of Rebholz or of Christmann), yet also something of the acid-as-everything philosophy of a Weiser-Künstler or a Jonas Dostert.
The wines see extended lees contact and are normally bottled unfined and unfiltered with lower levels of sulfur, so there can also be something of a natural-wine aesthetic, though this is not to imply that they are not crystal clear.
In short, the wines are totally unique.
For me personally, after nearly two decades of scouring Germany, stops this fascinatingly new and complex and beautiful and thrilling are not all that easy to find. And when you find them, you stop and pay attention.
So that’s the contextual introduction; here are some basic facts, a little biography, some information as to what Lukas is growing and where.
Lukas always knew he wanted to make wine. He started studying wine as soon as he could and then took apprenticeships at various estates in the area. In 2016 he began his own estate with only a few small parcels around Zeiskam. Currently Lukas farms only around four hectares. He has said five hectares is about the maximum he would ever farm. Right now, overall, Lukas is farming about 70% Riesling, 20% Pinot Noir and 10% Chardonnay.
Lukas primarily farms sites in his hometown of Zeiskam and in Hochstadt, a neighboring village. There is a third village – Neustadt/Hambach – in which Lukas has a few vineyards. Neustadt/Hambach is north and west of Zeiskam, just beyond the border of the map above. As with Rebholz’s village of Siebeldingen, the vineyards of Neudstadt/Hambach are in the foothills of the Haardt mountains. But we will discuss this later.
Zeiskam and Hochstadt are right next to each other and, overall, quite similar. The vineyards of both of these villages are in the lowlands, very exposed to the cool winds and much cooler in fact than the sites to the west and in the foothills. The western sites in the foothills often have more beneficial southern exposures and are sheltered from the winds, making them quite warm in comparison. This explains, at least in parts, the reason why historically these sites were more prominent than the vineyards in the lowlands and why the VDP map awards much greater prestige to the vineyards of the western parts. That’s why we have all those damn purple and red squares on the left side of the map.
As for size and soils, Zeiskam is smaller than Hochstadt, with only about 75 hectares under vine. Most of the famous villages in the Pfalz have 400+ hectares of vineyards, as a reference. The soils in Zeiskam are sandstone, loam, and loess. Lukas farms around 1.5 hectares in Zeiskam; nearly all of it is Riesling. They have replanted some of it; most of the vines are around 15-20 years old. The only single-vineyard Hammelmann bottles from Zeiskam is the Klostergarten Riesling.
Hochstadt is very similar to Zeiskam as far as the microclimate. It is a larger village with a few hundred hectare under vine. Lukas has roughly the same amount of vines here (about 1.5 hectares), yet because there is more limestone here and less sandstone, there are more Burgundian varieties including Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The vine-age here is slightly older at around 20+ years. Here the single-vineyard site is the Roter Berg and Hammelmann bottles a Riesling, Chardonnay, and a Pinot Noir from this site.
The soils, says Lukas, make a big difference. The wines of Zeiskam tend to have more structure and coolness; the wines of Hochstadt are stronger and saltier, but they usually also have more fruit and are more accessible younger. This, more or less, jives with my experience over the past few years, for what that’s worth.
Finally, Lukas farms less than one hectare in Neustadt/Hambach, a village maybe twenty minutes north and in the foothills of the Haardt mountains. If Hammelmann presents something of a counter-narrative to what one might expect from the Pfalz, keep in mind Hammelmann is in no way a rebel without a cause, or even much of a rebel, truth be told. Lukas in fact is a very serious and sensitive scholar of the history of the Pfalz with a tremendous pride in the region’s history and lore. The sites Lukas farms around Neustadt and Hambach are old and famous sites of the Pfalz.
The soils here are mainly red and yellow sandstone. There is no “village-level” wine made here, only three single-vineyards: Schlossberg, Schlossberg Terrassen, and a bottling dedicated to his grandfather, the “Wilhelm Friedrich.” As you can imagine, the Schlossberg is a warmer, site, angled to the sun. This is the most powerful wine Lukas makes. Finally, the Schlossberg Terrassen is produced from a site higher up in the mountains, a terraced site on top of the forest only recently cleared, exposing ungrafted vines planted in 1926 – they are nearly 100 years old. While at one time there were almost 100 hectares of these terraced vineyards going up into the forest, today there are only around two hectares remaining, roughly half of which Lukas farms. He says it is a tremendous amount of work and a very cool site (after 3pm the site gets no direct sunlight), yet the wines are singular.
I love this sentence he wrote me about the Schlossberg Terrassen: “This is already every year quite exhausting but there are great distinctive wines from the terraces. We love it.“
And as an exclamation point to the collection, Lukas farms one small plot in Neustadt with very unique Gneiss soils; this he bottles as the “Wilhelm Friedrich,” a tribute to his grandfather.
As for the viticulture and winemaking, Lukas is farming 100% organically. He is not certified. “I do not do this for marketing,” he says.
It’s hard for me to gauge, exactly, his technique for picking or ripeness. The wines have a distinctive edge, a rapier-like acidity, but Lukas does not pick very early, though he also does not want to be too ripe or over-ripe. Most of the dry wines clock in around 12-13% and are powerful, so Lukas is clearly not jumping the gun. On the other hand, nearly all the wines go through malolactic fermentation (yes, including all the Rieslings) yet still they have this incredibly pushing and incisive acidity, so something very special is going on here.
Lukas tends to press directly; the wines ferment in used barrels of all sorts of sizes and ages. The basic estate wines and village-level wines are bottled after one year unfiltered. As they can sometimes be delicately cloudy, Lukas bottles them as “Landwein” so he doesn’t have to have them approved by the local tasting board. The result of this, however, is that he cannot use the village names, thus his village of Zeiskam has to become “Zimkaes” and Hochstadt has to become “Dhochsatt” or “Haschdott.”
The Grand Cru single-vineyard bottlings see nearly two years in barrel and because of the natural clarification of time, these wines are also bottled unfiltered yet are clear enough to consistently pass the tasting panel. Thus these are Qualitätsweins and can state their single-vineyard origin. All the wines see somewhere between 20 and 40 ppm SO2.
This is a lot to take in, I know… and the story is only a few years old.
But I believe these are a singular expressions of the Pfalz – and they will be wines of consequence. It’s time to take notice.
