After 40 years of being a wine critic, it is not often that wine bottles surprise me. When I unpacked a box of samples from the new Unterlind winery in Germany’s Mosel Valley, however, my jaw dropped. You see, the typical Mosel wine bottle is a tall green flute, although some producers use Burgundy-shaped bottles for dry wines from pinot grapes. But these squat yet oddly attractive bottles all contained riesling wines.
Of course, at JamesSuckling.com we never let the packaging of a wine influence our impression of it or the way it is rated. The real test is always how the wine smells and tastes. And that’s when my jaw dropped again, first because all of the Unterlind wines are “classic”-style Mosel rieslings with natural grape sweetness retained by stopping the fermentation part of the way through. The second thing that struck me was how they all have both excellent balance and the delicacy we expect from Mosel wines of that style.
I picked the Unterling Riesling Mosel Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr Spätlese 2022 because it was the best of an excellent range I tasted from this producer, having the qualities just described to a very high degree. Just look out for these unique bottles and you won’t be disappointed. There is no label – the logo and all the information are etched into the glass! This only adds to their distinctiveness, although it does make them hard to read.
This is only the front-end story of Unterlind, though. There’s also a fascinating backstory. Unterlind is the creation of winemaker Heiner Bollig, who grew up in Trittenheim on the Mosel. He has worked for the world-famous Egon Müller-Scharzhof winery for a decade, and became the cellarmaster there in 2018. His wife, Veronika Bollig-Lintner, grew up in the mountains of Tyrol, Austria, then trained as a sommelier. In 2014 she did an internship at Egon Müller and ended up staying to do sales and presentation. Together they launched Unterlind in 2020 and now make wines from 1.8 hectares, all in top Mosel vineyard sites.
– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor
