Stefan Meyer

The Meyer family’s roots in Rhodt unter Rietburg, in Germany’s Südpfalz, stretch back to the 1700s. Stefan’s great-grandfather was both a winegrower and a wine merchant, and his grandfather, Karl Hermann Meyer, founded the estate in its current form in 1954 with just four hectares — among the first local growers to bottle and sell wine under his own name, at one point carrying sample bottles by bicycle and train as far as the region around Göttingen. Growth has always been measured and deliberate here, built one good plot at a time, focusing on quality-driven growth rather than growth for growth’s sake.

Stefan took over the estate from his father, Willi, in 2011, after training at the respected Bassermann-Jordan estate. He has continued to build on his grandfather’s foundation while pushing the estate further, eliminating chemical inputs, hand-harvesting and sorting every grape, and moving the vineyards toward full organic certification with Ecovin alongside biodynamic practices. It’s a bet that the more honestly the land is farmed, the more it shows through in the glass — and it carries into the cellar too, where spontaneous fermentation and long aging on the lees are non-negotiable for the estate’s top wines.

That philosophy plays out across the estate’s 16 hectares and roughly 70 small plots, where varied soils — red sandstone, ancient marine limestone, silty loam — and cooling downdraft winds off the nearby Haardt hills temper the Südpfalz sun. Different sites are matched to what they do best: cooler, higher ground for elegant Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, warmer loam for old-vine Pinot Noir, sandstone slopes for Riesling, and deep, warm soils for Syrah, the estate’s second red of real character.

The range runs from easy-drinking Bodentypen wines, through hand-harvested village bottlings under the Aus Rhodt label, up to single-parcel Lagenweine from densely planted old vines. Alongside traditional Riesling, Stefan also grows local red varieties like Portugieser, Sankt Laurent, and Dornfelder for the everyday Ein Liter Rhodt cuvée, and his old-vine Silvaner — some vines over 40 years old, bottled in liter format — offers a vivid, honest expression of the estate’s loam soils.