The view from the summit

Markus Molitor's supreme 2015 Rieslings

While we try not to take points too seriously, we couldn't help but notice that Mosel winemaker Markus Molitor shares top billing with our beloved Donnhoff as the German winemaker with most 100-point Parker wines. So we thought we better take a look. "Learn from the past" may be the winery's motto, and it is true that the Molitor winery has been in Markus' family for eight generations, but its present success seems as much driven by Markus' own ambition. When he took over the winery in 1984 there were 4 ha of vines, but now there are 40 across choice sites. He takes inspiration from the time when Mosel wines were the most sought-after in the world.

We have discovered it can be a little difficult to get to grips with Molitor. He has vineyards in 18 sites and releases over 50 wines every year. They of course come in varying degrees of sweetness, and he has a system of colour-coded capsules to describe them: white (dry), slate green (feinherb a.k.a. off-dry) and gold (sweet). He stars his Ausleses on an ascending scale of 1-3 to denote finesse.

We've tried to keep things relatively simple by focusing on a single vineyard, the Zeltinger Sonnenuhr, a top mid-Mosel site with old vines and slate soils. As Markus puts it, "this site produces our greatest dry and off-dry wines as well as many of our top botrytis wines." And when better to dip your toe in with a new winemaker than the stunning 2015 German vintage? /NT

Offered subject to confirmation for shipment early 2017