Daniel FriesPinot Noir “vom Schiefer” 2022 (750ml)

I first heard about Daniel Fries from a good friend who lives in the Mosel. It was a few years ago and his name came up in a very casual discussion about how Mosel Pinot Noir had become, almost overnight, something of a force.

She said to me only: “The wines are really, really good… and really fairly priced.”

Robert meanwhile had also heard of Fries; he in fact went and saw him on the recommendation of the truly gifted Mosel winemaker, Julien Renard.

Suffice it to say, Daniel’s wines are making something of an impact on the Mosel scene, at least to those paying attention.

Anyway, I made it a point to go visit him later that year. It was hardly an effort: Fries lives in Winningen, one of my favorite villages in the Mosel with what are easily (outside of the Bremmer Calmont about a half-hour further upstream) the most dramatic, truly mind-boggling vineyards in all of the Mosel and probably all of Europe.

This is the “Terrassen-Mosel,” a name it gets for obvious reasons. The picture above – dramatic as it is – does not do the severity of the inclines, nor the narrow scale of the terraces, justice.

For myself, I am cautiously blown away (if that’s a phrase I can employ?) with Daniel’s wines. Cautious because his first vintage was only 2019 and we are still at the beginning of what will be a long story. But I can say that it’s been a joy to taste with Daniel Fries and to watch and taste his development. I’ve now visited two times and tasted widely over three vintages. He is quiet, sensitive, thoughtful. There is obvious ambition here – you can taste it – but also a certain recognition that this will be hard work – that this is hard work – and there just aren’t any real shortcuts.

They have a certain density to them; they are meaty and coating in certain ways, with a delicate touch of new French oak that gives them fine layers of spice and a really lovely herbal complexity. Fries worked at de Montille in Meursault and their work with whole-cluster and new wood was influential, as was his time at Lingua Franca in Oregon. Here, winemaker Thomas Savre, who had previously worked at both DRC and Dujac, was another strong proponent of whole-cluster to create a multidimensional texture.

If this sort of luxuriousness is often not really my thing, Fries’ touch is superb: The wines prove to be seamless, perfectly proportioned with great acids and firm structures. They are textural, yet they have force and definition.

In the stellar 2022 Pinot vintage, these are truly triumphant wines, exuberant and expressive.

As you move up the quality ladder the wines see more whole-cluster fermentation and a bit more new oak. For the “vom Schiefer” (meaning “from slate”) the wine has about 20% whole-cluster and sees only used French oak.