Wine & Spirits - February 2018 - 73

Mountain Rescue

Old Mosel riesling grape cluster coutresy of Weingut Martin Müllen

(continued from page 37)

While Weiser was off crushing 2005s in New
Zealand, Martin Müllen mentioned to Künstler that a prime share of Enkircher Ellergrub, still in Immich family hands, had been
abandoned by its lessee. Might that not be an
excellent starting point for one's own wine
estate? "When I picked Konstantin up from the
Frankfurt airport," relates Künstler, "we drove
straight to the vineyard. A few days later, we
signed a forty-year lease."
"The main thing in 2005 was just to save
the vineyard," insisted Weiser as he presented
his collection of young wines from that first
harvest, made at Vollenweider's. But one taste
proved this an unduly modest assessment. In
fact, there had only been time to prune onethird of the vines, and over the following winter, Weiser and Künstler contemplated taking over a Rheinhessen winery. If they had
not found the price of mechanically farmable
acreage exceeded their modest means and
personal lines of credit, their destiny and the
Mosel's might never have merged. In 2007, the
couple secured a share of the neighboring Trabener Gaispfad ("goat path"), featuring ironrich red, as opposed to blue, slate, and further
expansion followed, first in Enkirch and quite
recently into Wolf and Trarbach.

hit his target of 10.5 percent alcohol without
picking a portion of his grapes unripe, then
blending their must into that of a later picking (an approach nowadays widely adopted
for New World sauvignon blanc). Stein was
convinced that, under prevailing climate conditions, there was no hope of achieving completely satisfying dry Mosel riesling below 11
percent alcohol other than from really old
vines trained in the traditional fashion to single posts. These Künstler and Weiser had in
abundance.

In Pursuit of Levity
Weiser's predilection, like Vollenweider's, was
for delicate, sweet wines in the style of Prüm.
Productive tension gradually emerged with
Künstler, who thought the couple should
also bottle dry wine. In 2009, she prevailed.
If Weiser worried that their musts wouldn't
spontaneously ferment to dryness or that in
the process the wines would lose what Künstler called "that filigree, delicate character
that is our dream," he had underestimated
the potential of their sites, their cellar flor and
his partner. It seemed natural to Künstler that
the couple's dry wines should include a counterpart to their delicately sweet Kabinett. Had
she heeded received opinion, she might have
thought differently. Not only was the entire
edifice of Germany's 1971 Wine Law predicated on grape sugar as an index of quality,
the notion was widespread that riesling grapes
picked at low must-weight needed support
from residual sugar to avoid becoming meager, shrill, aromatically stunted wine. Even
Ulrich Stein, a strong advocate of Kabinett
trocken, who farmed sites 15 to 20 miles downriver from Enkirch, frequently found it hard to

The significance of old vines goes beyond
metabolic equilibrium and restraint: Their
ultimate worth lies in their being genetically
diverse repositories of collective wisdom. Generations of growers were dedicated to selecting and propagating plants best suited by
mutation to their environment and to hardy,
distinctly flavorful musts. And in few places
does that chain of improvement and adaptation reach back farther than on those Mosel
slopes whose stoniness and steepness resisted
phylloxera. As for vines trained to single posts,
these feature just enough foliage to get the
photosynthetic job done while shading each
cluster from direct sunlight, a combination
that keeps sugar accumulation in check while
promoting aromatic evolution.
Künstler and Weiser's success with Kabinett
trocken can be tied to old vines (some centenarian) trained à la méthode ancienne, growing
in soils liberated from herbicides, achieving an
equilibrium in beneficial competition with a
cover crop. And it almost certainly depended
on choice of site: a relatively water-retentive
portion of the Gaispfad where pulverized slate
had accumulated into a deeper soil conducive

Old Mosel riesling selections feature tiny berries,
thick-skinned yet translucent, on small,
well-ventilated clusters.

to slightly higher yields than parcels farther up
on the Starkenburg wall. This sector's western
exposure, shared with the Wolfer Goldgrube
but with few other top Mosel vineyards means
the slate is slightly slower to warm than in an
otherwise similar south-facing site, but the
afternoon exposure and sheer mass of stone
insures excellent evening heat retention.
It took a few vintages, but Weiser-Künstler
Trabener Gaispfad Kabinett trocken really hit
its stride with the 2012-just over 11 percent
alcohol with a mere two grams of residual
sugar, while the 2014 and 2015 dipped to ten
and 10.5 percent alcohol respectively. But the
goal here wasn't achieving certain analytical
benchmarks. It was gustatory: Floral; featherweight yet palate-staining; transparent to mineral nuance; mouthwateringly saline; animatingly refreshing-these wines would almost
surely have brought smiles of recognition and
delight to the lips of 19th-century Mosel devotees. And whether such high acid levels had
ever tasted riper or been more adeptly integrated into any dry wine is dubious. Experience of Weiser-Künstler Kabinett trocken sent
ripples of inspiration and aspiration up and
down the Mosel.
Giants' Revival
Restoration of vines and of recognition to the
Traben-Trarbach loop gained impetus from a
2010 decision by descendants of Richard Böcking to revitalize the eponymous estate, with
Ungsberg as flagship. A remarkable revival and
amazingly rapid rebound had taken place the
year before, when youthful oenologist Gernot
Kollmann enlisted two wealthy and ambitious
friends to purchase the shuttered Immich-Batterieberg. Already in their first vintage, a collection was rendered that does justice to the
memory of Georg Immich and to the distinctive character of this estate's four Einzellagen,
in a style marked by laissez-faire vinification
and extended lees contact. (In 2015, Kollmann
and his partners acquired the diminutive
monopole Trabener Zollturm on the far side
of the Gaispfad, opening yet another promising chapter in the tale of restoration.) The
new team farms organically and has developed
a massal selection in preparation for selective
vine replacement, signs that they take a long
view not just of their tenure but of what it will
take if the early 21st century is to be looked
back on as the beginning of Mosel riesling's
Second Great Awakening. n
WINE & SPIRITS

FEBRUARY 2018

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