The Idig is one of the Pfalz's great limestone sites, and Christmann farms a four-hectare block in a prime vineyard that's effectively a monopole, an anomaly that goes back to the Palatine Counts holding the land for more than four centuries. What makes it taste the way it does is the rock: a massive limestone massif left after the collapse of the Upper Rhine Graben, capped with terra fusca clay studded with limestones, plus some basalt that the von Buhl family carted over from the Forster Pechsteinkopf about 150 years ago. Steeply pitched for the Palatinate and facing south-southeast at 146-176 meters, the site gets a constant gentle wind running off the Stabenberg down through the Klausental, which dries the fruit and keeps it clean. The Riesling here was planted in 1995; it's picked entirely by hand into small crates — in 2021 across four passes in early October — then fermented with its own yeasts and raised in large wooden casks. Grosses Gewächs means bone-dry from a top classified site, and at 12.5% this is the serious, savory end of German Riesling rather than the fruity one. If you've only met Pfalz Riesling in its friendlier guises, this is the bottle that recalibrates the whole category.