I think it’s impossible to understand the stress, the pressure, the emotional rollercoaster of the last few years for Moritz Hoffmann. Daniel Vollenweider was his friend, his mentor, and then his partner in the estate before he died in the summer of 2022.
I’ve written a lot about this. You can read about Daniel’s passing here; you can read about Moritz Hoffmann’s succession here.
Hoffmann had huge shoes to fill. The 2022 vintage was not easy; Daniel had just passed. 2023 proved to be even more complicated.
Yet Moritz produced, for me, one of the greatest collections of both vintages. His 2022 dry wines are cooling and precise. His 2023er flaunt the intensity and electricity of this very, very tricky vintage.
The wines taste, to me, like nothing less than a triumph. I have the suspicion that these wines will catapult this estate to a new, very rarified level – at least for those who are really paying attention. (For my own tastes, in the Mosel, I would say Vollenweider sits at the very top, alone with Egon Müller, Willi Schaefer, Julian Haart and Stein.)
I felt so strongly about this collection that I almost didn’t trust my first reaction; I felt like I had to re-taste the wines when they arrived in the U.S., again, before writing any sort of elegiac endorsement.
Well, I have tasted them again, and they are everything I tasted the first time. They are a triumph.
I’ll get too emotional, so I’ll let the always stoic and reserved authors of Mosel Fine Wines set the tone.
“Moritz Hoffmann and his team have succeeded in producing a magnificent collection in 2023. The wines have become even more refined and precise than in the past. The 2023er Felsenfest, a light, bone-dry Riesling, is a great success and the best produced at the Estate. All the wines are superb, and a special mention goes to the new 2023er Goldgrube Kabinett Wurzelecht, a truly magnificent and playful wine and a strong contender for Kabinett of the vintage!”
“In addition, the recently released 2022s are superb, especially the Goldgrube, which defies the usually warmer side of the vintage. The Vollenweider Estate [“Felsenfest”] continues to produce magnificent wines, at an even higher level than in previous years.”
That’s a lot of “superb,” you know?
The current releases include the 2022 dry wines and the 2023 Prädikat wines and they have all taken the amplitude and power of a Vollenweider, but stretched out this intensity so everything feels finer, clearer, more attenuated.
They are heartbreaking wines. Daniel is smiling from above.