“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
Fifteen years after Stein’s essay was republished in The Art of Eating, it’s probably time for an update. Yet this is not a simple story to tell. The Mosel covers a distance some 100 miles long; as an appellation it has somewhere just under 8,000 hectares under vine, including flatland vineyards, steep vineyards and terraced sites.
What makes it even more confusing, especially for the American wine lover, are the jarring contradictions the valley contains.
On the one hand, the Moselle is one of the most famous, most canonical viticultural regions on earth, a peer at least in history to Champagne and Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rioja, Tuscany and the Piedmont. Yet this place, the Moselle, is also in ways a poor and dying place. It pains me to write this, but I think it is true, at least in part.
For wine lovers in Germany, in Europe, the Moselle is often seen as a bit provincial. A bit of a country mouse to the Rheingau, Rheinhessen, and Pfalz’s city mouse.
Drive through the famous towns in the Pfalz’s Mittelhaardt and you’ll see a traffic jam of large Audis, BMWs, and Mercedes lined up at rather fancy-looking estates. There are manicured lawns, maybe some fountains. The people visiting these estates have expensive-looking eyewear; their clothes have been recently pressed. With some rare exceptions, you do not see this caliber of eyewear or dry cleaning in the Moselle. Instead of big fancy cars, you see a lot of old and small Skodas and Opels; you see even more RVs.
This is another fact of the Moselle that I think Americans miss. For many Germans — for many Europeans at large — the Moselle is just a very long and winding campground. That is its main claim to fame.
For miles and miles along the Moselle, people sit on folded chairs in flat, grassy RV parks, the men shirtless, basking lazily in the sun. Above them, behind them, all around them are some of the greatest vineyards on earth. Few of these tourists seem to care much. For them, the vineyards are a nice backdrop to the peaceful river.
It’s a beautiful place, and it’s not expensive. That’s enough.
In other words, part of what makes the Moselle so complicated is the nose-in-the-air wine connoisseurship endorsed by goons like me, flanked by the crowds actually gathered there for sausages and water skiing.
It’d be something like having an amusement park right next to Vosne-Romanée, so that all those well-heeled visitors, recently deplaned from their private jets, had to take in the majesty of Romaneé-Conti within earshot of screaming kids, whiffs of cotton candy, and the sound of diesel generators.
The Moselle is this and more. It is unquestionably rustic, with small hotels and pensions that have rarely been updated over the last three or more decades. Summer here is the “high time” — your average Moselle winery probably sells most of its wine quite cheaply to these European tourists to help them wash down their döner kebab and currywurst – or just to take home to friends, souvenirs of time spent in “wine country.”
In the winter, the valley is empty. If this stillness is profound and refreshing for someone who’s lived in New York for over twenty years, it also speaks of a land without obvious opportunity.
This rawness, even crudeness, has certainly hurt the Moselle as a destination, and in turn the reputation (and understanding?) of its wines. Those suburban neighbors who “collect wine” and will tell you (over and over again) about their trip to Tuscany have never been to the Moselle and have likely never heard of it.
If this is a fact part of me treasures, both the authentic rawness and the fact my neighbors have never heard of the place, it has also hurt the Mosel.
Drive through some of the most famous villages in the Mosel and things look alright – and I think they are, more or less. Some will tell you that these blue-chip villages are perhaps in a better place then they were in 2010. I’m talking about the Mittelmosel (Middle Mosel) villages from Piesport through Wintrich, Brauneberg, Bernkastel, Graach, Wehlen, Zeltingen, Urzig and Erden. Vineyard prices are more or less stable. These sites are farmed and the wines they produce can be sold at a profit.
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 even beyond. While there are certainly steep, terraced sites in this part of the Mosel (round the bend near Ürzig and Erden and the Würzgarten and Treppchen rise up almost threatingly), many of the sites have been cleared of terraces, the Flübereinigung or reorganization of the vineyards smoothed out the slopes of this part of the Moselle, like an iron being pressed to a wrinkled shirt.
Yes, these are the villages and the vineyards with fame, with commercial resonance; yet they can also be farmed mechanically, economically.
Once you leave this “Hollywood” mile of the Mosel, these most famous villages and vineyards, you also leave much of the tourism, the hustle and bustle of the Mosel as well.
In the long span of the Moselle just downstream from this place, from Enkirch say to Koblenz, over 30 miles long as the crow flies, this is a place that feels in some ways like a different Mosel, a different world.
Here, one begins to see more and more forest encroaching into the patchwork quilt of vineyards, one also begins to see more terraces. The clean, easy slopes of the Mittelmosel are here 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 are the vineyards that are truly suffering. These are the sites that the Mosel may soon lose.
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.
What happens to a landscape when no one can or wants to pay for human labor?
In a way, the task is too great. Some estimate that in the next decade the Mosel will lose 500 to 1,000 hectares. It is extremely difficult to find concrete data, for a wide number of reasons, yet every year somewhere around 50 to 100 hectares of vineyards are uprooted or simply abandoned. To me this seems inevitable, if I am being honest.
What feels to me more important is not the number in itself, but the nature of what is saved. It must be a question of quality, not quantity.
The terraces of the Mosel are a primal part of the very identity of the Mosel.
Yes, in many cases, the terraces have the oldest vines, the most diverse genetics. Oftentimes they are the most historic sites, the most beautiful sites. In many cases, they simply make the most profound wines. This is the Mosel we must save.
Yet to make this a reality, we have to better communicate their cultural significance, their historical importance, the singular elegance of the wines made from these terraced slopes.
There can be no doubt: These terraces are a great liability because of the extreme amount of human labor they require.
Yet we cannot forget 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 six villages, from Clemens Busch’s home village of Pünderich, to villages completely unknown to the American market such as Briedel and Neef, 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 another 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.”