Mosel is captivating, but to get it right one needs to talk to right people. Together with the owner of Weingut Heymann-Löwenstein we are trying to point out the things that make Mosel tick: Mosel’s intricate backstory, differences between the two Mosel banks and the mysteries behind steep slopes.
“We’re really lucky to have all this space here in our winery. I remember that when I was a child the cellar was the size of this nook. And now we probably have 800 square meters in these tunnels. Then money poured into the region. It was also the time of new romance, when people in the east of Germany lived in dreams of Goethe, read Goethe, and Goethe was a great lover of wine, the Mosel and the Rhine. It became very fashionable to drink local wines, money, investments poured in from all sides, including investments in winemaking, and people began to build houses, create modern companies of which winemakers also became a part.
Diving Into Mosel
Well, you know the story – then the First World War came, the Second World War, Germany went bankrupt, the wine culture went bankrupt, and then in the 80s we started working here. We were able to buy all this for almost a penny, in fact, we were handed over the farm almost by force, because no one wanted to work here – at first we rented, and then bought it. We started at the deepest point of the crisis. Now, of course, we wouldn’t be able to afford this, but at that time the money was invested for a very long time.
No one wanted to drink Mosel wine because it was considered sweet, sloppy, the region was filled with plonk wine. When you came home you’d drink Chablis, or something Italian, or Alsace, but never Mosel. And then we began to think – and we started with almost no money – so we had to think faster than those who had money. And we really began to ask ourselves what we want to do. And then we quickly decided that we would not make any sweet wine, that we would only make dry wine, and we would make wine the way we liked ourselves. And if we go bankrupt then I’d stop everything: go to university, do my doctorate, whatever, but I will not compromise and will not make wines that I don’t like.
When Customer Is Not King
It was the first step on the road to success. Because today the question is the same: do you deal with the mainstream or do you deal with wine as part of culture, as you see fit, and only then you start looking for buyers? The concept that the customer is king: I don’t agree with that. The customer may be my friend, my partner, but I will not let him be my king. I make wine the way I think is right, and then I look for people who might like it.
Fortunately, more and more people like our wines. This is the antithesis of “taste-optimized wines”, “global world”, “yeast”, “food design” and so on. More and more people don’t want “delicious wine”, but wine that conveys the character of the territory, has a soul that would tell me the history of its place. It’s like a whole world flooded with Chardonnay! More and more people are saying, “No! I want to get a taste of Meursault, Corton, any particular place.” This is a completely different approach.
And this is not a fight against industrial wine – just as I will not fight mp3-players or reproductions of paintings by Marc Chagall. But we must make the difference clear. It’s not so simple: like if you take a photo – is it a photograph or something edited in Photoshop and beyond recognition? Is it still your photo or a computer product? There are many cultural aspects that we know very little about.
The Right Path
Sometimes I think that my grandfather was a very happy man: he tried to create wines that were delicious. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t; there were no books, recipes, special technologies. Today we have technology over the edge, we all know about “botox” and “silicone” that can be used to make wine taste better. And it’s our cultural choice not to do it.
And this is our story, which is not so easy to tell people. This is true. But on the other hand, it’s something very cool, because it’s not a black and white approach, it’s a pathfinding. And if we say that wine is an important part of culture, we must accept that this part is not black and white. This is not the same as it was in Russia or Germany – one step aside leading to execution. And a very good aspect of the democratic approach is that we can discuss different ways of making wine, making music or painting.
I love both the Rolling Stones and Mozart: you can’t say that this is bad, but this is good. No! Today I want to listen to this, tomorrow – to that. And that’s what makes working with wine so interesting: because it’s about finding your own way. When you drink wines from different regions, you get new ideas, new sensations.
What Wine Really Is
In this context, it is important to note that wine is a child of culture. Wine is not a product of nature. In modern marketing they like to present wine as a natural product. I think this is a very stupid approach. Even the vineyard is not natural land, it was not God who decided to grow grapes there, it was done by men. When we imagine that there is nature and that there is a person who interacts with it, the question is, where does civilization or culture begin, what should our interaction with nature be like in order for new things to be born?
To me wine is something that happens between man and nature, wine happens between the ideas of Apollo and Dionysus, between control and freedom, between structure and chaos.
All this means only one thing – may creation come with us, the flow of energy, thanks to which things come to life. This applies even to this oak – all trees grow on slate soils, the country does not matter so much whether they are French or German, it matters that they grew on slate soils. Because I want my wine to have an appropriate design in which the energy of shale soils can influence the wine. I don’t want my wines to have wood flavors, that’s the wrong concept. “Long live the charisma of the vineyard” is the right concept. And just for this, it is very important not to use all the modern tools that the industry offers.
State of Slate
When you talk about the taste of soil, what does that even mean? This means giving freedom to the microorganisms that live in it, which means not killing them, letting them enter the winery along with the grapes, not using bentonite, sulfite powder, enzymes and commercial yeast, and so on. Simply wring out, purify by precipitation, pour into a large barrel and leave alone. For me, this is creation to let the vineyard express itself.
We never know exactly what will happen to wine and how. I will even say more – as soon as I know what will happen I’ll be on the wrong side of life, because in that case I will simply become a product manager, not an oenologist. And I want to be an oenologist who does what he has to do, waits, and then is amused by the results. I love to be amused by the result. I don’t want to know what will happen in advance. I want to be part of a bright, cheerful process.
The taste of wine will develop over time. The question is, do you like a wine that has spent 10 years aging? It is very easy to say: “The wine is not very good now, but wait for ten years, it will improve”. You know, all those marketing speeches. And people are very sensitive to these things, so I have to provide proof.
Great Wines Don’t Lie
For me a “good” wine is a wine that doesn’t lie. This is the relationship between the information on the label, how the wine is presented and what is actually inside. The question is always what you want to show. Do you want wine to be delicious, do you want wine to be a cultural message? There are different levels of what wine is and what it can be.
You made wine, people taste it and say, “Oh! What it is?! Why does this wine touch the strings in my soul? Where does this energy come from? It is not simple. And I don’t know what to do or not to do to make such wine.
Here you can see what defines the character of the Rottgen vineyard. This is the slate that guarantees identity. As you can see it’s blue inside. This is seen when the stone breaks. Over time, the yellow-brown hue returns which means that the iron in the soil is gradually oxidized. And the fact that the color of these soils changes over time means that these rocks were formed in anaerobic conditions, deprived of oxygen, some 12 kilometers underground, 400 million years ago. 12 million years to fill the bottom of the sea with sediment. This blue slate comes mainly from the sea and now, once exposed to air, it changes its color to brown.
Other vineyards like Uhlen Roth Lay, are deep red in color meaning they were oxidized before they hit the sea. And then, 320 million years ago, another continent came from the south, and during the collision, the sedimentary rocks of the seabed were compressed into slate and stone.
Steeper and Steeper, But What Does It Mean?
Modern steep hills, like the one in the distance, are an area between two roads with one or two terraced walls; sometimes there are no walls at all. They were formed in the 60s and 70s which made it possible to mechanize the work in the vineyards. Today this is still the mindset of politicians and most winemakers: to prepare vineyards for mechanization. Which ultimately means machinery even on steep slopes. Awful, but this is modern winemaking.
You see really first-class steep hills on the “wrong” bank of the Mosel – everything was abandoned because those hills faced north. With global warming of today it’s not that bad there. I know this because my father used to have a vineyard there. But it is not easy on that side – it is difficult to reach, it is full of wild boars and everything is surrounded by forest.
Another Stone In The Wall
And then we return here, to the Middle Ages, where we feel at home, where we feel good. These terraces were created during the times of the Romans, others — later, when Prussia was present. The soils here have never been farmed, so that’s what this clean, purist soil is – nothing more than shist. There has never been manipulation and destruction. They built walls so that the soil would not slide down – that’s all.
When we talk about walls, we always talk about the balance between clay, sand and alluvial rocks, and here we have just a large percentage of sand and clay, which makes the stone especially strong, increases the durability of the walls. I would say that in 100-150 years such a stone will collapse. If you make a wall out of these stones, they will live for 400 years. We buy stones about 40 kilometers from here, sometimes it’s more reddish, sometimes more blue-ish.
We never had a problem with erosion here, only when they started tilling the soil and making wine in the 60s without using walls so that it would be easier to mechanize everything. The soils, of course, slid down and one had to call a tractor and return the soils to their place. And this system has already proven its efficiency, the walls have to be patched all the time, this is a natural process, but necessary, we go there and do it. If you do this, then we have a very stable system. But even with that we have to bring the stone here from time to time, that’s what we do now. Here, for example, we have to bring the stone in the winter time, like it was done a long time ago. Nobody has done this in the last 50 years, so we need to bring this vineyard back to a sustainable state.
Colors vs Taste
So the color properties are good for talking about soils, but I still don’t really like it because it ends up with people saying “These are typical red slates.” And then they start talking about the taste of wine that comes from “red slate”, a stupid idea in itself, because the color indicates the percentage of iron oxide: you can have a blue shale that has a lot more iron than orange, just it has not yet been oxidized, and you are already drawing conclusions about the taste of wine. It doesn’t make any sense. Therefore when we talk about the diversity of soils, we say that this is Uhlen Roth Lay and the soils there are red, and this is Rottgen and the soils there are blue, but their phenotype is yellow-brown, so when we talk about Rottgen, we report the color only to we had some sort of communication tool. But I always refuse to associate the color and taste of wine, because, seriously, we don’t know. There is some connection with taste, but this connection is due to a million factors – climate, humidity, the presence of microorganisms, this is a formula with many unknowns. It’s not that easy because different soils look different in different microclimates, green, red, blue, whatever you want to call them.
A Secret Behind Grafting
See, there’s a new plant here, planted probably two years ago. And here another vine died, we have to replant it next year. So every year or two we inspect our vineyards for such vines and gradually replant them, so on average. the age of the vineyard remains the same. There are many planting schedules, different vines. Even here we have a high percentage of ungrafted vines and when we transplant them we use mass selection from our own vineyards and plant ungrafted vines as well.
When I see bunches from these vines, I think they are better – smaller berries, more energy, in some vintages you will not see any difference, but in extreme years they show themselves, they are always smaller clusters. On American roots it is very difficult to return to the “correct” yield for the first 20 years, but in the case of “native” roots, this is not something to worry about. The reason my father and grandfather grafted vines onto American roots was not at all because of phylloxera. It was because they wanted to increase the yield, because American vines give you twice as much. And now we’re going back because we don’t want consumer goods, we want cool wine.
The Uhlen vineyard is what you see, we are at the beginning of it. When we talk about optimal conditions in the Mosel, we understand: this is an amphitheater with a southern exposure, with a forest on top of a hill that protects the vineyard from the cold air rolling down from above, the mirror effect of the Mosel that reflects the sun. And of course, to make a Grand Cru, the soils must be unique. There are only 1.5 hectares where we have this geological formation that determines the taste of our wines. The soils here are slightly bluish. The microclimate is maybe more or less the same for a little bit more and it’s up to us to figure out where the soils are different and where it makes sense to make a different wine.
Historically it was only Uhlen, so it was up to me to find out that the soils here are so different that you can make three different wines. We were able to convince our village neighbors to also fight for it, we applied to Brussels for Uhlen to become the first controlled individual vineyard and now we have European PDO certification.
The Grosses Gewachs “Recipe”
Grand cru is a mixture of historical significance and taste and the way you work. Grosses Gewachs starts with the quality of the soil. This soil quality for us in the Mosel is something deeply studied, something that we have been talking about for centuries, how one site differs from another. Previously, the word Grand Cru was not used, but there were many different classifications, especially created by the state to collect taxes, they wanted higher payments from the best vineyards, so there was a lot of research on how good certain sites were. It is likely that even within the same area there were different areas for paying different taxes.
So it was all very intense, like the Prussian authorities with their power of logic, and even a little before that, after the French Revolution, Napoleon began to redo the French cadastre, and for us an important milestone was that in 1802 new instructions came from the Ministry of Finance where it was pointed out that only the areas with the lowest yields can be the best. With these new norms and mindsets, we started a new path and it was extremely beneficial for the Mosel that only 3% of the vineyards were awarded the Grand Cru status. This is a very important understanding that you don’t have to go too far with a Grand Cru. If you become very democratic and start asking winemakers “Where is your Grand Cru here?”, everyone will immediately start waving their hands and saying “I have everything Grand Cru here, but my neighbor doesn’t!”
The fact remains: Grand Cru is a gift, an offer to make good wine. But my job is to make wine. As in Burgundy, it is the result of centuries of interaction between nature and man, and it is also part of our culture, including the economic part of our culture: everyone wants to have more and it is easier and better sold. Something like that. There are civil strife and quarrels here, as in Burgundy, there are many disputes whether this or that vineyard is good enough, but nothing can be done, this is life.”