October 2021 Wine Club
Wines of the Mosel
Welcome back to the wine club blog! As we move into the harvest festival season we’ve decided to focus on a region well known for its October festival — Germany! Most people’s experience of German wine starts and ends at sweet Riesling, and our intention this month is to show you how much finesse, nuance, and precision is possible with this noble grape.
Tech Talk: Sugar and Sweetness
As wine sellers in the South, we have a lot of conversations about sweetness. This is a factor of winemaking and tasting that people tend to have strong opinions about. But what exactly is sweetness? Is it just the amount of sugar in the wine? How much is natural? Does it affect hangovers? I could write a book on just this topic, but let’s try to break it down quickly.
Sugar is a natural product of the ripening process of the grape, and it is the primary fuel for the production of alcohol during fermentation. Sweetness is a complex cluster of perceptions affected by fruity aromas, texture, acid, alcohol, and of course, actual sugar content. The ripening process produces both sugar and sweetness, and is a key factor in German wines, as we shall see.
Humans have a natural preference for sweetness, as it indicates ripeness, and both sweetness and ripeness are elements of a well balanced wine. However, sugar is addictive, with massive implications for public health, and wine doesn’t exist in a vacuum but in a competitive beverage market. Regular consumption of sugary beverages alters your palate, notably by affecting your perception of sweet, bitter, and sour flavors. The market dominance of these beverages places winemakers in the challenging position of producing authentic wine for a much smaller market or producing sweet wine in hopes of standing a chance against hard soda.
This is part of why we’ve chosen to highlight wines from Germany: these wines more than any other demonstrate the distinction between sweetness and ripeness, and help clarify our desire to balance refreshingness and pleasantness in a drink with authenticity of craft and ethics of production. The extreme difficulty of producing both ripeness and sweetness in the most northerly winegrowing regions in the world has led to a style that deeply understands the use and value of both.
Region Focus: the Mosel
The Mosel valley, Germany’s easternmost wine region, is more northerly than even Alsace or Champagne, France’s coldest wine appellations. With headwaters in the Vosges mountains of France, the Mosel river cuts deeply into the Rhenish Massif, a metamorphic uplift formation holding many of Germany’s wine regions. Viticulture was introduced here by the Romans, starting in the outpost of Trier and gradually expanding. The Mosel is famous for its steep, rocky slate cliffs, ideal for terraced vineyards as the porous slate drains abundant rainfall well and collects scarce warmth and sunlight. High latitude makes winegrowing particularly difficult, requiring a good vintage and hardy varietals to make it through the winter into ripeness. Through the 20th century, Mosel wines have been rare, but this is one of the few wine regions benefiting from climate change, and the last few decades have seen grapes in the Mosel achieve full ripeness nearly every year.
Peter Lauer, Barrel X Riesling 2020
Because of the extreme scarcity of viable vineyard sites in Germany, winemakers share vineyards extensively, farming specific rows or subsites of named vineyards. Florian Lauer farms the Kupp, Feils, and Schonfels vineyards of the Saar region, on the Upper Mosel’s largest tributary river. He successfully won the legal right to use the historic names of his subsites on his single site bottlings, which tells you a bit about Lauer as a winemaker: precise, meticulous, obsessed with terroir. In the Schonfels vineyard he restored the Lambertskirch site which had fallen into disrepair, effectively creating a new vineyard through dedication and determination. All of his farming uses organic practices and is entirely by hand.
Like most winemakers in the Saar, Florian Lauer is focused on producing Riesling, but unlike his most famous neighbor Egon Muller, his Riesling pushes the limits of dryness. All of his wines are fermented spontaneously after a whole cluster press with no additions. They are lightly filtered through diatomaceous earth and matured in a mix of steel, fiberglass, and neutral oak depending on the cuvee.
The Barrel X is a blend of fruit from all his vineyards and fermented off-dry. It’s a wine of outstanding clarity, with bright floral minerality and ripe tart citrus balanced perfectly through the nose, palate, and finish.
Clemens Busch, Riesling Troecken 2019
Farther down the Mosel in Punderich, Clemens Busch farms the Marienburg site almost exclusively. The Busch family originates in Punderich as subsistence farmers growing a polyculture of vegetables along with wine, with Clemens grandfather, also named Clemens, becoming a professional viticulturalist and wine seller in the 1920s. Clemens grew up working the vineyards with his father, also named Clemens, and began winemaking in 1974. Within two years he had converted entirely to organic farming, and drawing on the family’s expertise in polyculture and natural farming, eventually achieved a biodynamic certification. He uses estate grown nettle, horsetail, and chamomile in his polyculture and biodynamic treatments.
Clemens Busch’s 2019 Troecken Riesling is crisp, dry, and elegantly structured. Technically drier than the Barrel X with 8.3g/L acid and 4–5g/L of sugar, it comes across as austere without being severe. Harvested from a mix of young and 50–60 year old vines grown on grey slate, it carries the distinctively Mosel elevated minerality supported by a robust savory and funky dimension. 60% barrel fermented with the remainder in steel, the texture of this Riesling is surprisingly rich and dynamic, with a hint of creaminess from 20% malolactic fermentation.
Come into Grandiflora anytime this October to try a rotating flight of German wines! We have stocked a dizzying variety of wines from some of our favorite producers, including single-site and grand cru selections from Clemens Busch, and would love to share them with you!
