Moritz Kissinger“0 Ohm” White 2023 (750ml)

The “0 Ohm” wines are what could be called the “estate wines,” a red and a white that, as their “0 Ohm” name implies, ripple with energy and bounce. An “Ohm,” if you’ve forgotten from your high school science class (as I had), is a measure of electrical resistance. In the case of both the red and the white, there is no resistance to this energy, this current. The 2023 white is a blend of Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay (as was the 2022) with a few days of maceration. The wine is saline, with waxy citrus fruit, lemon pith and herbs. This is not an “orange wine;” it is finer and has more definition and clarity than that suggests. To me, one would have to look perhaps to the Jura to contextualize this wine.

All of the grapes are sourced from the cool, limestone-riddled vineyards in and around Kissinger’s hometown of Uelversheim in the central Rheinhessen – about a half-hour south and west from the famous Roter Hang, if you know it, and about a half-hour north and east from Keller’s village of Flörsheim-Dalsheim, if you know it.

When you approach Kissinger’s wines through the lens of many Rheinhessen wines (most of which are grandiose yet crystalline dry Rieslings), they feel shocking, discombobulating, disorienting. Kissinger’s wines are more relaxed, wider. They use their textural qualities in an unapologetic way; they have an approachable honesty that isn’t rustic exactly, but it is maybe jarring – the degree of clarity, the forthrightness.

And then, with the second sip you approach the wines more as a white or a red wine grown on limestone without thinking about the cultural baggage of the Rheinhessen, or of Germany at large, and they make perfect ****ing sense.

I’ve had this thought on multiple occasions tasting Mortiz’s wines: “How did no one make wines like this before?”

To me Kissinger’s wines feel simultaneously so original and absolutely obvious and perfect, as if this where the Rheinhessen that has always been around… or should have been. They feel like cousins of iconic French regions and wines – Champagne, Jura, Burgundy – authentically filtered through the soil of the Rheinhessen, by a young winemaker who has grown up on this soil.

Tomoko Kuriyama from Chanterêves posted about Kissinger and we had a nice little exchange. She wrote to me, “I love the soul and aesthetics of his whites… there’s a warmth and elegance, and on top of all that there’s an effortlessly defined style.”