“For the sake of the cultural, social, environmental, and economic vitality of the entire region, Ulli Stein is calling for a concerted, widespread effort to save the remaining vines of the Mosel. He urges winemakers to pay above-market prices for the grapes purchased from steep sites and to seek out endangered vineyards; he encourages grape-growers to hold out in the face of downward pressure on prices; he suggests that aging winemakers relinquish their plots in alluvial soils along the river in favor of continuing to work the steep slate sites above it; and he solicits support from fellow Mosel residents in trumpeting the singularity of their region. None of these suggestions will succeed in isolation, and even with a coordinated effort, the forces aligned against wines of unique personality and uncompromising quality are well entrenched.”
“Still, as Stein says, it’s worth a try, if not for lovers of Mosel Riesling, then at least to honor the old Riesling vines themselves,
which have earned a chance to be protected from thorns.”
Published in The Art of Eating, 2010, No. 84
Almost fifteen years later, as Philip Lardot comes to the U.S. from the Mosel, perhaps we should offer some updates. This is not a simple story to tell, but here are some big-picture updates.
Nearly fifteen years later some villages are doing well; they are perhaps in a better place then they were in 2010. For the most part the “winners” are limited to the most famous villages of the Mittelmosel (Middle Mosel) from Piesport through Wintrich, Brauneberg, Bernkastel, Graach, Wehlen, Zeltingen, Urzig and Erden.
Two key factors are at play. First, they are famous villages with famous vineyards; there is “brand recognition” here. Finally, and this is just as important, with certain exceptions most of the famous sites of the Mittelmosel are steep but smooth. In other words, they can be farmed mechanically.
Stein, speaking in early 2024, acknowledged that there are normally buyers for the vineyards that can be farmed mechanically – in the Mittelmosel and beyond. It is the terraced vineyards that are truly suffering. These are the sites that the Mosel may soon lose. To save them, we have to better communicate their cultural significance, their historical importance, the singular elegance of the wines made from these terraced slopes.
While advances in technology are designing machines that can mechanize the work in steeper and steeper vineyards, there are no machines that can work the terraces.
Only humans can work the terraces.
It is the long span of the Moselle just downstream from the Mittelmosel, from Enkirch to Koblenz, over 30 miles long as the crow flies, that is in dire straits. I have called this place the Magic Mosel.
Here the clean, easy slopes of the Mittelmosel are disrupted by jutting, sometimes awkward, oftentimes spectacular terraces, rising up like small angular monuments to an earlier version of the Moselle, which is in fact exactly what they are.
These terraces are a primal part of the very identity of the Mosel.
If the terraces have been removed from many parts of the Mittelmosel to make farming easier, they exist in plentitude in the Magic Mosel. As mentioned, these terraces are a great liability because of the extreme amount of human labor they require.
Yet they are also a great asset. Because the terraces here were not disturbed, neither were the vines. The magic of the Magic Moselle is not only the terraces, but also the old vines, the genetic cultural heritage that is here. Tiny islands of ungrafted vines 50 to 100 years old and older are commonplace here. Growers will nonchalantly speak of parcels planted near the turn of the (last) century; they raise their eyebrows and laugh gently to themselves when they see “Vieilles Vignes” declared at 30 or 40 years. In this part of the Moselle, these are adolescents hardly even worth considering; they go into the most basic cuvées.
Yet there is more at stake here than the growers’ “old vine” bragging rights. If 99% of the vines of Europe are on American rootstock, the Moselle is one of the few places where this pre-phylloxera heritage remains, somewhat unscathed. Can you taste the difference? Certainly the depth and complexity of old vines is unquestionable; whether the ungrafted detail is discernible I can’t honestly say.
But for me the true importance of these old ungrafted vines rests not in any specific quality of the wines they produce, in the same way the importance of the Parthenon rests not in the specific quality of the marble or the incredible sophistication of the design. What is important is the history, our united human history, here and tangible for our present and our future. This is one of the greatest, rarest, and least-spoken-of treasures of the Moselle.
To me it is perhaps the most important.
Here, in this poorest and least-known section of the Mosel, maybe one can feel the history of the Mosel more than anywhere else in the valley. Yet the names of the towns here are, for the most part, known only to residents of the Moselle itself: Briedel, Zell, Alf, Bullay, St. Aldegund, Bremm, Valwig, Cochem, Klotten, Pommern, Müden, Burgen, Hatzenport, Oberfell, Niederfell, Gondorf (I’m naming only a third of the villages), finishing at the semi-famous village of Winnigen before the Mosel empties itself into the Rhine.
It is here, in this forgotten place, where we arrive at the work of Philip Lardot and Rosalie Curtin. They are among the most-important young growers farming this landscape of sacred, yet-abandoned, sites. While growers such as Clemens Busch and Ulli Stein are here farming, and therefore saving, the ancient terraces in this region as well, they do so largely in their hometowns.
Lardot and Curtin are outsiders. And as outsiders, they are taking on vineyards scattered across this endangered region – they have no hometown.
A new acquisition in the St. Aldegunder Himmelreich; ungrafted vines in steep terraces, many of which will need to be rebuilt. This is back-breaking work.
Philip and Rosalie are farming approximately five hectares comprised from no fewer than twenty-six individual parcels spread out over five villages, from Clemens Busch’s home village of Pünderich, to villages completely unknown to the American market such as Briedel, to the once-famous Zell, to Stein’s St. Aldegund and further downstream, to a village I had never heard of: Briedern.
Of their holdings, roughly one-third, or nearly two hectares are steep, terraced vineyards, many of which have ungrafted vines trained on single poles planted before the world wars. In these parcels, everything must be done by hand.
This is one part of the story; the story of saving the Mosel. Yet there is a second chapter as well: A story of redefining what the Mosel is, or can be.
To pigeonhole this new movement in the Mosel as simply a “natural wine” movement would be selling it short, if not blatantly misrepresenting it. The inspirations appear to me to be less the youthful rebellion of much natural wine, and more a considered and thoughtful approach to a region (the Mosel) and a grape (Riesling) both of which shape wines of very high acidity.
In order to sculpt this formidable acidity into something more balanced, growers such as Lardot and Curtin rely not on residual sugar (all their wines are bone dry) but on some degree of skin contact and a more extended élevage in smaller barrels.
If this feels like a “new Mosel,” it’s important to remember two things: First, while Lardot and Curtin do work with Müller-Thurgau, Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris, their greatest holdings are of Riesling and their top wines are nothing more than single-vineyard Rieslings. In a certain way, the estate could not be more traditional. Second, it’s also important to realize that in some ways this new style of Mosel winemaking may have echoes from the famously dry Mosel wines of the late 19th century. This was, after all, a period long before filters and the ability to block malolactic conversions.
I had a conversation with Vinous’ David Schildknecht about this idea and he pointed out the following. In so far as growers like Lardot and Curtin recognize and value sélection massale (which most certainly they do in this old-vine Magic Moselle), in so far as they follow viticultural regimens less influenced by the technologies of the 20th century and have a rather relaxed attitude toward malolactic conversions and value the delicacy and lightness of the Mosel, all of these characteristics would be applicable to the fin-de-siècle Mosel.
Curiously, while a longer élevage is also often seen as a throwback to a more “traditional” winemaking, in the late 19th-century golden age of Mosel wines, most of these wines were actually bottled quite early. Relying on spontaneous fermentation could also be seen as a “traditional” way of winemaking, yet Schildknecht pointed out to me that cultured yeasts were already in widespread use by the late 19th century in certain parts of the Mosel.
Yet the point is less that this “new” style of Mosel winemaking is exactly like it was 100+ years ago. While I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate that some of these new wines may taste more like the wines made in the Mosel 150 years ago than the contemporary Prädikat (off-dry) wines of many famous estates, this isn’t really my point either.
The point is more that culture is alive, that tradition is not static and is always evolving, changing, right under our noses.
I strongly believe this style of winemaking in the Mosel has a powerful precedent and an influential future ahead of it. This is the authentic avant-garde.
In the end, it is also possible that these outsiders, farming these forgotten, old vines in the poorest and least-known villages of the Mosel, working the terraces and dedicating themselves to this beautiful yet financially difficult existence, perhaps they are the cavalry the Mosel needs so desperately right now.
Our role, in turn, is to support them, if not, as Stein said, for the lovers of the Mosel, “then at least to honor the old Rieslings vines themselves, which have earned a chance to be protected from thorns.”