Less than a hectare of gneiss in Neustadt, at the foot of the Haardt mountains, and Lukas Hammelmann refuses to blend a drop of it away — no village wine comes out of these famous old Pfalz sites, only three single-vineyard bottlings, of which this is one. The Wilhelm Friedrich is named for his grandfather, and it's treated as a Grand Cru dry Riesling should be: direct-pressed, fermented in used barrels of assorted sizes and ages, allowed to go fully through malolactic, bottled unfiltered, and given an extra year in wood before release. That malo is the counterintuitive part — it should soften a Riesling, and instead these wines come out with a rapier edge of acidity. Hammelmann started in 2016 out of Zeiskam, a corner of the Pfalz locals wrote off as potato-and-onion country, and he farms 100% organically without bothering to certify it ("I do not do this for marketing"). 2021 was a year that favored the Pfalz for dry Riesling more than the Mosel, Saar or Ruwer. For anyone who thinks they know what Pfalz Riesling tastes like, this is the argument against them.