A German master-craftsman
Hand-crafted wines of near-perfect quality, highly site-typical, extremely long-lived - and in line with those of Riesling’s golden age of a hundred years ago. It was a vision that inspired 20-year-old Markus Molitor when he succeeded to his family estate in the 1980s, and one which he has spent his adult life making a reality. He now sits easily in the very top rank of German winemakers.
How has he achieved this? For one thing, he is a fearless, perfectionist workaholic. He has an uncompromising attitude to vineyard and cellar work. For another, he inspires the devotion of a seriously committed team. The steep, difficult sites he works are some of the best the Middle Mosel has to offer. And then there’s the very high quality of the vine material; he has a high proportion of ungrafted vines of up to a hundred years of age.
2019 was a glorious vintage in the Mosel. While German winemakers have widely enjoyed the recent era of global warming, 2018 was, if anything, a little too hot. But 2019 landed right in the sweet spot; Molitor’s 2019s are ripe but possessed of thrilling acidity, as elegant as they are intense. We are delighted to offer a selection of some of his finest bottlings. They of course come in varying degrees of sweetness, and Molitor uses a system of colour-coded capsules to describe them: white (dry), slate green (feinherb, so off-dry) and gold (sweet). He stars his Ausleses on an ascending scale to denote finesse, with 3 stars being the most exquisite. /NT
