On Friday, July 22nd, my friend, the Mosel grower Daniel Vollenweider, passed away.
Daniel was diagnosed with late-stage prostate cancer in July of 2019. He was an intensely private person. While most of Daniel’s close friends and colleagues knew that he was sick, it never felt like something he wanted discussed. He wanted neither sympathy nor pity; he wanted to work in his vineyards. He wanted people to taste the wines without distraction.
I want everyone to know that he fought this disease like a motherfucker and kept his strength, his calm, his dignity and humanity until the very end. I was lucky enough to see Daniel three times this past year, including a brief hello last week. He smiled at me as I gushed about his current releases; it was obvious he was in pain.
Daniel you are no longer in pain, for that I am grateful. It goes without saying that all of us at vom Boden send our deepest condolences to our friends in the Mosel and in Germany and in the U.S. who knew Daniel. We send our love to his partner and family. It goes without saying we are heartbroken.
In my life I have met few people with the immutable strength that Daniel had. To appreciate the true grit, the fucking guts of this guy, Daniel Vollenweider, you have to understand, to really consider, his origin story.
Daniel Vollenweider was born in Switzerland to a family in no way involved with winemaking. He moved to the Mosel in the late 1990s without, so far as I’ve ever heard, knowing a single person there. He loved the wines, that was enough. The mythical origin story is that he had tasted a bottle of Egon Müller a few years earlier which convinced him that the Mosel was the greatest wine region on earth.
And so he packed up and moved there.
Daniel bought a one-hectare plot in the Wolfer Goldgrube in 1999. It’s hard now, with the Mosel going through something of a renaissance (to some degree because of the work of pioneers like Daniel), to appreciate just how difficult, how counterintuitive and radical this move was.
The Goldgrube was a famous site – any grower with any real knowledge of the Mosel would place it among the top vineyards of the region – and yet it was steep, with craggy terraces here and there. It had very old vines, many of them ungrafted. In short, to work this site would be expensive, labor-intensive and painful. Because of the old vines, after all this work, yields would be miniscule. And because the site hadn’t had an author worthy of it, the Goldgrube remained unknown. So to sell the little bit of wine you could make through backbreaking work… well, you would have no marketing advantage. This too would be hard work.
And this is what Daniel Vollenweider, not only an outsider in the rather closed world of the Mosel but a foreigner in Germany, signed up for.
Stories of this crazy Swiss guy working the formidable inclines of the Wolfer Goldgrube spread quickly; eyebrows raised all through the Mosel. Even more quickly, the reputation of his wines spread.
For the first few years he focused on the Prädikat wines – Kabinetts, Spätlese and Auslese and the rare dessert wines. In 2003, only a few years into his journey, he was named the winemaking “Discovery of the Year” by the influential Gault Millau magazine.
I first heard about Daniel’s wines some time around 2005. They were rare and not well-distributed in the U.S. If you could find a bottle and bring it to a Riesling dinner with some dorks, you got some serious cred — something like showing up with a bottle of Domaine des Miroirs Mizuiro, though without the financial excesses particular to our sick little moment in capitalism.
From the beginning, Vollenweider wines were lavish, intense, explosive even. You would call these Rieslings Baroque if they weren’t so delineated, so defined. The wines showcased a surreal energy, glossy and kaleidoscopic mid-palates with a sternly Swiss definition and detail. They were indeed a bit like Egon Müller, yet with more flesh, more razzle-dazzle.
As calm and inward-looking as Daniel was, his wines wore their style and soul on their sleeves. If you couldn’t taste the obvious talent here, you weren’t paying attention.
I was a fan and followed Daniel’s career; we offered the wines as much as we could at the New York City retailer where I worked from 2005 to 2012. In 2013, I started vom Boden with only four growers. Our internal coding, to this day, reflects the order the growers were taken on, though the first four were all at the same time: Florian Lauer got the VB01 code, Weiser-Künstler VB02, Ulli Stein VB03 and Julian Haart VB04.
In the spring of 2014, to my astonishment and amazement, Daniel Vollenweider agreed to work with me. I still remember the feeling; I felt like the luckiest son of a bitch in the world. Vollenweider had been something of a hero to me; a mysterious, quiet figure in the Mosel, yet already in many ways a giant.
Daniel Vollenweider was and is VB05 – only the fifth grower to believe in me and what I wanted vom Boden to become.
Over the years, Vollenweider’s reputation grew. His Prädikat wines are masterpieces; there are simply no better Kabinetts being made on the Mosel. There are differences in style, for sure, but in terms of raw talent, Daniel is at the top echelon. Beginning around 2010, Daniel began to focus more and more on dry Rieslings. If the first attempts were a bit heavy, sometimes clumsy, Daniel was nothing if not patient, methodical and hard-working. He put his shoulder to the grindstone and worked at his dry Rieslings; he found his own style.
For me, 2014 was his breakthrough vintage with dry wines, which is saying something as this was not an easy vintage. They have gotten better every vintage and the last two vintages especially, 2020 and 2021, are without a doubt to me the greatest wines Daniel has ever produced, dry or off-dry.
Daniel did not make these wines alone. Weingut Daniel Vollenweider will continue, in very good hands. Ever rational and pragmatic, even when facing his death, Daniel planned for everything. This estate was 20 years of blood, sweat and tears; one of his greatest hopes was that it would continue beyond him. In 2019, right after his diagnosis, Daniel made the young Moritz Hoffman a co-owner of the estate. For three years, Moritz and Daniel have worked side by side. They have made the last vintages, arguably the best the estate has ever produced, together.
I know this gave Daniel incredible joy; he seemed at peace with what would come next.
This weekend, I had planned on working on an offer for Daniel’s most current releases. They arrived only last week and I felt like they needed, not a push, but more context. While Daniel is widely considered one of the greatest winemakers in the Mosel by nearly all other Mosel winemakers (in many ways Daniel is a winemaker’s winemaker, that rare mix of incredible talent and incredible humility), I don’t feel like he has ever quite gotten the recognition he deserves in the U.S.
Last spring when I was in Germany, Julian Haart said to me, bluntly, as Julian usually says things, something like, “Daniel is one of the best in the Mosel.” Yesterday, hours before I learned that Daniel had died, I reached out to Julian to see if I could quote him on that in the offer. Julian is one of the most critical and honest tasters I know and he gives, believe me, zero fucks about trying to sugar-coat anything. His opinions about other growers’ wines are about as close to an objective truth as I’ve been able to find.
As one does these days, I DM’d Julian through Instagram.
At 3:22pm Friday, July 22, I asked Julian the following, word for word: “I’m going to do a big write-up on Vollenweider this weekend. Can I quote you that you think he’s one of the best in the Mosel?”
Julian responded in short order, again word for word: “I don’t think he is one of the best in the Mosel.”
There was a pause as he typed a follow up: “He is one of the best in Germany.”
Daniel, my friend, I will do my best not to grieve you but to celebrate your daring life, your tenacity and calm grit. It was my honor to represent your journey, your wines. I am not going to stop now; your legacy continues. Rest in peace.
