Summary
Weingut Heinrich Vollmer in Ellerstadt is one of the largest privately owned wine estates in Germany and at the same time one of the most idiosyncratic in the Pfalz. Across around 104 hectares surrounding the village, alongside Riesling and Spätburgunder you will mostly find French-influenced varieties – Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Grauburgunder. That is no accident: Heinrich Vollmer trained in Burgundy as a teenager and brought back an idea of wine that looked exotic in the Pfalz of the 1970s. He became famous for planting Cabernet Sauvignon long before the variety was even authorised in Germany – a conflict that ended up in court in 1987.
History
Heinrich Vollmer was born in 1948 in Durbach in Baden, into a winegrowing family. What shaped him, though, was not the family home but an exchange to France: from the mid-1960s he spent several years at the renowned Burgundy house Bouchard Père et Fils. There he encountered a wine culture in which origin, cask ageing and red wine belonged together as a matter of course.
After returning from France came the break with his father's business. Vollmer moved to the Pfalz and in 1972 acquired a run-down estate in Ellerstadt. What followed was rapid expansion: within a few years the operation grew into one of the largest private wine estates in Germany. Vollmer consistently bet on varieties that hardly anyone in the Pfalz had in the vineyard at the time.
That is exactly what brought him into conflict with German grape variety law. In 1987 he was convicted for growing Cabernet Sauvignon – a variety not yet authorised in Germany at that point. The proceedings were later dropped, and the variety has long since been legalised. In the same year, Vollmer founded a second winery with Bodega Enrique Vollmer in Argentina's Valle de Uco, at around 1,100 metres of altitude.
Location & Terroir
Ellerstadt lies between Bad Dürkheim and Ludwigshafen, where the eastern foothills of the Haardt give way to the Upper Rhine plain. This is not the classic Mittelhaardt backdrop of steep slopes but flatter, warmer terrain – and that is precisely an advantage for Vollmer's mix of varieties.
The soils around Ellerstadt consist mainly of loess and loess loam, plus sand and gravel from the Rhine rift valley, locally complemented by limestone and clay marl. Loess stores water and warmth, while sandy and gravelly patches heat up quickly and drain well. That suits late-ripening varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, which elsewhere in Germany struggle to ripen at all. The Pfalz is in any case among Germany's warmest and driest wine regions – almond and fig trees are part of the local scenery.
Style & Philosophy
The estate's signature is grounded in France. White wines ferment cool in stainless steel and stay on the fine lees until bottling, which builds texture without smothering the fruit. Red wines are traditionally fermented open on the skins and then aged partly in large wooden casks, with the top wines of the ALTUM range spending up to 18 months in barrique. The underground cellar in Ellerstadt covers around 2,000 square metres and holds steady temperature and humidity.
In the vineyard the estate says it works as gently as possible and in particular avoids herbicides; healthy soils are considered the precondition for wines with character. Annual production is around 450,000 litres of white wine and a similar volume of red – a scale that shows Vollmer is not a niche operation but thinks about quality across volume.
Notable Sites & Wines
The vineyards are spread across several single sites around Ellerstadt and nearby. Among the sites named in connection with the estate are:
- Ellerstadter Bubeneck
- Ellerstadter Kirchenstück – shared with the neighbouring Gönnheim boundary
- Ellerstadter Sonnenberg
- Deidesheimer Hofstück
The range is worth reading in three blocks: the accessible estate and single-vineyard wines from Riesling, Weißburgunder and Grauburgunder, Chardonnay, Dornfelder and Portugieser; the Meisterstück blend, which combines Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot with the newer crossings Acolon and Regent; and at the top the ALTUM range with Cabernet Sauvignon, Spätburgunder and Grauburgunder. Sparkling wines and a few rarer varieties such as Gelber Muskateller and Auxerrois round things off.
Awards
Vollmer wines regularly collect medals at German regional and national wine competitions – among them gold at the regional competition for the ALTUM Cabernet Sauvignon trocken Barrique 2009 and a distinction for the ALTUM Spätburgunder Auslese trocken 2015. Better known than any single medal, though, is the role Heinrich Vollmer has played for German viticulture: he demonstrated that Bordeaux and Burgundy varieties work in the Pfalz, and in doing so cleared the path for a whole generation of Palatinate red wine growers. The wines today go to German specialist retail and fine dining, to airlines, and to export markets as far as North America and Asia.