The unique expressiveness of Germany’s Middle Mosel

No wine lover forgets their first glimpse of the steep-sided Mosel Valley as it snakes its way through the hill country of the west of Germany close to the borders with France and Luxembourg. From New York to Sydney friends and strangers have poured out their emotional memories of that moment to me, often late at night over a glass of Mosel riesling.

The best place to have that key wine experience is on the Middle Mosel, the largest of the Mosel region’s five sub-regions, where the river makes many great loops, for example at Piesport. There you see much the same spectacular amphitheater of steep vineyards and slate cliffs the Roman poet Ausonius describes in his poem Mosella from 371 AD. And the best “classic” style rieslings from the top vineyards of the Middle Mosel are uniquely expressive white wines. To understand them you have to see how they fit into the big picture of white wines generally.

German wine suffers from pigeonholing because sommeliers and consumer often think of it as rieslings from vineyards with slate soils that are floral in aroma, light in alcoholic content with a bright interplay of natural grape sweetness and racy acidity. That’s a pretty good description of “classic” style Mosel rieslings, but they are exceptions in the broader context of German wines. Today the riesling vine only accounts for 23.3% of Germany’s vineyard area, compared with 62.2% in the Mosel’s. Unlike the Mosel, the vineyards in most German vineyards don’t have slate soil, and from the late 20th century the focus of wine production there shifted to medium-bodied dry white and red wines! That development made “classic” Mosel wines even more special.

“It’s a unique style of white wine that winemakers around the world try to copy, and some of those wines are very good, but they rarely achieve quite the finesse of ours,” said Dr. Katharina Prum of Joh. Jos. Prum in Wehlen. She’s right too! Since she began directing the estate with her father Dr. Manfred Prüm in 2003 J.J. has ignored the dry wine trend and produces almost solely rieslings with natural grape sweetness. It is retained when the wild ferment either stops by itself, or cold is used to gently stop it before all the natural grape sweetness has been converted into alcohol. This results in the low alcoholic content of Mosel wines in this style, typically in the 7.5% to 9% range.

Not only are the J.J. wines almost supernaturally vibrant and subtle, they’ve been of incredibly consistent quality since James and I started following them. We first tasted the wines from the top Middle Mosel producers back in the mid-1980s when the excellent 1983 vintage was shown. When I lived in Bernkastel/Mosel in the early 1990s, I quickly realized that the Moselaner, the region’s people, have a very special mentality. As Ernst Loosen, of the Dr. Loosen estate in Bernkastel/Mosel, one of the region’s powerhouses, said to me back then, “the valley is narrow!” He wasn’t talking about the geographical, rather the valley in the minds of the Moselaner!

Sometimes the Moselaner can be extremely stubborn and frustrating, but this same personality trait also results in the kind of fanatical commitment to quality of Loosen and Prum. It’s always been hard work making a living with wine in the Mosel, not least because there’s no big city nearby in the way that Napa Valley has San Francisco and Sancerre/Loire is just around the corner from Paris. Since generations that’s forced leading Mosel winemakers to export to Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, etc. It’s the export focus of these famous producers, plus long-established houses like Max Ferd. Richter in Muhlheim and Selbach-Oster in Zeltingen, today run by Constantin Richter and Johannes Selbach respectively, that made the region famous. They all released a slew of wines that we rated 90+ and some that earned 95+ during the last year.

All these producers believe strongly in the Kabinett category, the lightest and most filigree style of Mosel riesling. They’re the ideal introduction to the region’s “classic” wines, because they clearly show what makes the wines special. Feather light in body, but brimming with fruit, floral and herbal aromas, plus an enormous mineral freshness they taste like nothing else on Planet Wine. Because of their lightness and the fact they aren’t analytically dry they’re often presumed only to be suitable as aperitifs. However, they can be very food-friendly wines, easily taking the spiciness of East Asian cuisines and the smokiness of smoked salmon in their stride. If you’re used to drinking top Bordeaux and Burgundy, you may also wonder if Mosel Kabinetts can be serious due to their low prices. 

The first league of Middle Mosel wine producers is not a closed shop nor stylistically narrow. For example, during the time I’ve followed developments there Markus Molitor has taken his estate in Wehlen from humble beginnings to being one of the region’s largest. His wines are an excellent example of how the region’s rieslings not only reflect conditions in the vineyard, or what the French call terroir, but also the personality of their maker. Regardless whether the vineyard site is famous or an underdog, all the Markus Molitor wines bear the bold stamp of his drive and determination.

For a long time we felt that the region’s dry rieslings mostly lagged behind the sweet ones. However, that situation changed dramatically in recent years and during the last 12 months we rated two dry rieslings a perfect 100 points, the Riesling Mosel 1896 2019 from Carl Loewen in Leiwen, a wine made from vines planted in 1896, and the Riesling Mosel Neumagener Rosengärtchen Von Den Terrassen 2019 from Gunther Steinmetz. These amazingly deep and complex dry whites were vinified much as the top Mosel rieslings of a century and more ago would have been.

Nobody has taken Middle Mosel retro further during recent years than Ernst Loosen. Since the 2011 vintage he has matured some of his best dry wines, the GG Reserves, on the lees in barrel for two years before bottling them; normal practice before the arrival of sterile filtration technology in the region from the late 1940s. The majestic Dr. Loosen Riesling Mosel Erdener Prälat GG Reserve 2015 that’s just been released rated 99. 

Now he is in the process of applying the retro approach to the region’s “classic” rieslings with grape sweetness. That means keeping the natural grape sweetness at the level it was during the 1960s and 1970s and maturing the wines in cask and bottle for many years. The working title of these wines is “Tradition” and that’s how we named them in our tasting notes. The first release is probably still a couple of years away and I was the first critic to be able to taste the entire range.

For Ernst Loosen the motivation for his “Tradition” wines is a problem some of the other leading Middle Mosel producer’s don’t suffer from. “We don’t have a market for the sweet Auslese any more, so we have to do something different with the grapes we used to put into for this category,” he said. Many regions around Planet Wine traditionally devoted to sweet wines, like Sauternes and Tokaj, are adapting to a world less interested in sweet wines and the Middle Mosel belongs to this group. As Katharina Prüm says, “it is a special niche.”

See below a list of the top wines from the region rated recently. 

– Stuart Pigott, senior editor