Last Friday, Clemens Busch and I traveled to Paris on a beautiful blue-sky morning to pour the following day a selection of his wines at Juan Sanchez’s La Dernière Goutte in St. Germain. Mark Williamson of Macéo and Willi’s Wine Bar joined us for the tasting and later lunch at Fish La Boissonerie. It was a great turnout at the shop with a number of leading Parisian wine journalists and trade jam-packed in the shop, and the tasting event continued until the early evening.

Among the favorite wines of the crowd was Clemens’s 2008 Riesling “vom grauen Schiefer” trocken (dry), which sold well on Saturday and comes—as the name implies—“from gray slate” in a core section of the hillside, below the castle and near the vineyard sign “Pündericher Marienburg.” The tasters could relate to this style of wine that Clemens likes to make, namely a dry Riesling with backbone and transparency. “Vom grauen Schiefer” has 7.2 grams per liter residual sugar (RS).

Juan also had on offer the vibrant 2008 Riesling “vom roten Schiefer” (“from red slate”)—our “Wine of the Week.” The grapes come from parcels in two red-slate vineyards: one is the Rothenpfad sector of Marienburg, above the viaduct. The well-weathered soil here makes for fine and elegant wines. The other plots are in Pündericher Nonnengarten, a single vineyard further downstream past the castle in a richer red soil that gives stronger and earthier wines. Unlike in 2006 or 2007, “vom roten Schiefer” 2008 has less residual sugar (ca. 11 rather than 20  g/l RS) and more cut. The wine truly reflects the vintage character (low alcohol, good acidity) and has the typical spicy, herbal flavors associated with red slate.

The Buschs’ carefully-tended vines grow in healthy soils (organic since the early eighties), and the wines are genuine expressions of their terroir, with varying plots, expositions, and slate soils. Different from certain winegrowers, Clemens lets his wines do the talking. He’s refreshingly modest and good-natured, though ardent and avoids the dogma and rhetoric prevalent among some, including those in the natural wine movement—both winegrowers and followers alike. He’s an abiding, conscientious winegrower who is actually in his vineyard doing the work himself, that is, by hand in steep slate sites (no tractors here!) as well as in his cellar as wine-maker.

Photograph by Andreas Durst.

Dan said Clemens’s hands look like baseball catcher’s mitts. They’re strong  from a lifelong of hard work. A few years ago on a train ride past Pünderich from Frankfurt Airport, I’ll never forget looking up to see Clemens driving wooden stakes down into the red slate of Rothenpfad, while his vineyard team looked on. Few winegrowers go through the trouble of replanting in the steepest sections, where only the labor-intensive and time-honored training of the vine with stakes is possible, much less do the backbreaking work themselves.

On our drive to Paris, Clemens and I talked about different issues, and he questions the rampant use of copper among some of his organic and biodynamic colleagues, especially in France, where controls seem lax. So much is talked about in regard to the use of sulfur, but what about copper, which is a heavy metal? It reminds me of the lack of discussion about nuclear power in France and the dangers it poses.

Clemens uses neither pure culture yeasts, enzymes, nor fining agents  in the cellar, especially if he’s putting in all the arduous work with biodynamic treatments in the vineyard. His wines ferment spontaneously for a long time on the lees, sometimes over a year or more. (One Fuder of 2005 Fahrlay took 30 months to finish fermentation!) He’s one of the last to bottle on the Mosel. Most properties are already offering their new vintage in the spring, and Clemens doesn’t even bottle the majority of his top wines until August or September. Although he would like to get by without adding any sulfur, he uses low doses, because his wines would otherwise taste poorly and oxidize more quickly without it. Wine should be about pleasure foremost, not following trends or appeasing the cult of non-sulfur wines.

The best dry Rieslings from the VDP-designated “Erste Lage” (“First Growth”) Marienburg are called “Grosses Gewächs” (labeled “GG”). Clemens made three different GGs from his various parcels within Marienburg in ’08: Marienburg, Rothenpfad, and Falkenlay. The latter two are old-named sections within Marienburg, curiously allowed on the labels by the authorities despite the 1971 German Wine Law. (The ’71 Wine Law sadly disallows the use of thousands of former site-specific names, which are similar to the northern Rhône or Burgundian climats.) His straight Marienburg GG, for example, is from an area known as Treppchen, an old place-name that cannot be put on his label. He could have declared 2008 Fahrlay (a site with predominantly blue slate) as GG, too, because it also fermented naturally under the requisite 9 grams per liter residual sugar, the upper limit for trocken on the Mosel.

Pre-2008 vintage “vom grauen Schiefer” was labeled as his two-star Spätlese trocken from Pündericher Marienburg. Now in the VDP, his non-GG dry Rieslings can no longer carry either a Prädikat (e.g., Spätlese) or a single-vineyard (Marienburg) designation on the label, even if the grapes come strictly from Marienburg, such as his Kabinett trocken. In other words, the VDP’s idea is to do away with Prädikats for dry Riesling and to only have the top bottlings, the GGs, with the “First Growth” site mentioned on the label. This forces producers to declassify or rename dry Rieslings that are not GG. For example, Clemens’s dry Kabinett will lose the Prädikat in the 2009 vintage, even though all the grapes come from a high, steep section of Marienburg with gray-slate soils.

In addition to Clemens’s 2007 Auslese “vom roten Schiefer,” Juan had selected as a fourth wine the stunning first vintage of 2008 Marienburg GG “Rothenpfad.” This comes from the oldest vines in the sector Rothenpfad, including the site known as Weissenberg.

We also had on hand a number of extra samples, including his ethereal 2008 Marienburg Auslese Goldkapsel (auction wine) and 2008 Fahrlay and 2008 Fahrlay-Terrassen, the terraced old-vine bottling. Both wines are from a core blue-slate section at the foot of the slope and nearby the ferry that he takes across the Mosel from his half-timbered home (built in 1663) to the vineyards each day.

It’s not about the brunette, whom Lyu Hanabusa shot for Mark Williamson’s Willi’s Wine Bar vintage 1993 poster, but rather an observation about skin contact (or, pre-fermentation maceration) for Mosel Riesling. Admittedly, this is another geek posting about a technique (Maischestandzeit) that has so many facets and will only be covered here on a superficial level, but deserves a closer look.

It’s common practice in the region, especially for sweet wines, with botrytis-affected grape bunches, to be pressed without any maceration. Many producers in their sixties or seventies always did it this way. Some critics argue that skin contact (click on our glossary and scroll down for the definition) has become à la mode on the Mosel. And surely, they’re right that some wine-makers are following a trend here. Yet, macerating Mosel Riesling before pressing is a traditional method of handling the grapes before fermentation begins in order to extract from the grape skins aromas, phenols, and potassium, the latter helping to buffer acidity. Obviously, many wine-makers, especially those focusing on high-residual-sugar wines, handle their grapes differently, that is but putting them directly in the press with or without crushing the grapes beforehand, and if crushed, then without maceration.

Looking at some old archive photos of the Mosel Valley in Karl-Josef Gilles’s Das Moseltal Zwischen Koblenz und Trier 1920-1950, crushers are shown placed on top of open-wooden vats that were carried on horse- or ox-drawn wagons at the foot of steep hillside vineyards and then the crushed grapes were brought back to the winery for pressing. The grapes often macerated an entire day or even longer on their skins, pips, and juice. The winegrowers would then fork the grapes into a wooden-basket press. These old-style presses gave fine, clear juice, which was further exposed to air before running down into the barrel cellar below. Today’s pre-fermentation maceration with must oxidation, as practiced by Clemens Busch, reproduces these time-honored methods. Certainly, in the old days some winegrowers crushed and macerated purely as a means to get more grapes into the wooden vats and to avoid having to go back to the winery. Others consciously sought out to extract from the skins more aromas and phenols.

Just as skin contact is used to increase phenolics, whole-bunch pressing has become popular among producers in other regions to decrease them. Both Olivier Zind-Humbrecht and Jean-Marie Deiss told us on our visit to Alsace last summer that they prefer to handle their grapes as gently as possible by direct (pneumatic) pressing, no crushing or macerating beforehand. This probably has some to do with the climate being warmer and the wines naturally more opulent.

At Markus Molitor and Van Volxem (two large, flagship estates on the Mosel and Saar, respectively) extended hang times and skin contact are preferred and both have invested in modern Swiss-made, stainless-steel basket presses. Van Volxem also likes to offset any bitterness resulting from phenols extracted during prolonged skin contact by micro-oxygenating the must, but not the wine. The results at both estates speak for themselves.

Ulli Stein explained that maceration is a complex theme that needs to take into account different factors such as wine style, grape variety, climate, health of the grapes, ripeness levels, acidity, and so on. Generally speaking, he feels that skin contact on the Mosel increases the complexity of the later wine, but decreases its elegance. It’s a fine balancing act and only pertains to healthy, high-quality grapes. Less healthy grapes, in his opinion, should either be crushed and pressed or direct-pressed. For healthy grapes to be macerated, he considers three main factors: grape acidity and quality as well as the sought-after wine style.

In a high-acid vintage, and for progressively higher ripeness levels, he does longer macerations. For example, his 2008 Palmberg Spätlese trocken was 14 hours on the skins; whereas, the less ripe 2008 Himmelreicht Kabinett trocken only 4 hours. And the opposite is true for riper years and lower quality wines, i.e., less maceration. He also feels it’s better to macerate at cooler temperatures to avoid excessive extraction of phenols. As a rough guideline, he points out that one hour of maceration reduces acidity by 0.1 grams per liter and increases the danger of the wine later going through malolactic fermentation either during or after the end of the alcoholic fermentation. For ripe grapes, he recommends macerating with the stems. Otherwise, it makes sense to destem. In Alsace or Chablis, he feels the wines already have enough opulence, but less acidity and delicacy. That’s why they often avoid doing skin contact, instead preferring more elegance at the cost of fullness, which is in their wines already plentiful to begin with. They don’t need extra oxidation measures to reduce it.

Last November I tasted and compared Weingut Günther Steinmetz’s 2008 Riesling (a special Triage Wines’ bottling) and 2008 Mülheimer Sonnenlay Riesling Spätlese trocken “Alte Reben.” Although the latter showed more grip and substance from “old vines,” the extended 36-hour skin contact didn’t make it—as some might presume—rich, oxidized, or overly extracted. And both held up beautifully over several days in the fridge and are excellent examples of naturally low-alcohol, dry-tasting Middle Mosel Riesling. Even if the grapes for the 2008 Riesling were crushed and then direct pressed without skin contact, it still has a good depth of flavor and clocks in at a mere 10% alcohol by volume. The old-vine Spätlese is only a degree higher, at 11% alcohol, and also has a light color and bright acidity despite the long skin contact.

Why does Stefan Steinmetz then choose to do skin contact on the one wine, but not for the other? For his 2008 Estate Riesling (Triage Wines), the grape bunches were harvested en bloc and included grapes that were affected with botrytis. He wants to avoid macerating these grapes, which could give off-flavors. His old-vine Spätlese from the Sonnenlay vineyard consists, on the other hand, only of healthy and ripe grapes, because the botrytis-affected bunches were harvested beforehand. In other words, there was a pre-selection in this site.

Stefan has several reasons for doing skin contact for his top dry-tasting wines: (1) reducing acidity with higher mineral components; (2) lessening the danger of atypical aging taint by extracting Caffeic acidity; (3) increasing the aromatics; (4) extracting more flavor, glaze (schmelz), and volume; (5) getting the ripe tannins; and (6) following a tradition on the Mosel, because the pH levels are low, i.e., the wines have higher acidity and more resistance to microbiological spoilage.

Direct-pressed grapes on the Mosel will rarely result in a wine having the same structure than ones that have had some maceration. Many producers avoid pre-fermentation maceration, even for dry Riesling. Erich Weber at Hofgut Falkenstein exclusively ferments with wild yeasts in Fuder, and the wines, mostly dry, are slowly squeezed without crushing in a spindle press. Even though he’s less in favor of skin contact, the wines are gently pressed for three to five hours that includes some maceration. With his richer soils and crisp, taut style, he’s less keen on breadth in his wines.

At Weingut Peter Lauer on the Saar, Florian Lauer has, as most producers, a pneumatic press. His is an Italian-made Defrancheschi, and he likes to do whole-bunch pressing, as well, with some maceration inside the press, depending on the wine in question. He also treads the harvested grapes before pressing. Ulli Stein, whose style is for dry, light-bodied Mosel Riesling, does after gentle crushing a cool maceration before pneumatic pressing. In a throwback style, Martin Müllen, in Traben-Trarbach, likes to do a gentle crushing—without destalking—followed by putting the grapes into an old basket press and then into barrels. Each winegrower has their own approach.

As with all aspects of wine-growing and -making, it depends on the producer and the style of wine to be made. Many factors play a role in determining if it makes sense to do skin contact and what the end results will be.

Photograph by Tobias Hannemann.

Florian Busch of Weingut Clemens Busch sits at the kitchen table with a glass and a bottle of 2007 GG Rothenpfad, a top dry Riesling from red slate. Rothenpfad is an old place-name within today’s Pündericher Marienburg.

If you look closely at the section of the late nineteenth-century Prussian tax map used for the header image of our blog, you will see the area known as Rothenpfad. This sector within the Pündericher Marienburg vineyard consists primarily of red slate and is one of Clemens Busch’s top terroirs. A portion of his Riesling called “vom roten Schiefer” (literally “from red slate”) comes from this site and the other half from a red-slate parcel in the Pündericher Nonnengarten, which lies nearer the castle downstream.

He use to bottle an old-vine selection within the Rothenpfad sector under the former place-name Weissenberg. Now, he bottles this as Rothenpfad alongside his other top terroir wines that include Fahrlay (a stony blue-slate site at the foot of the slope across from his home) and Falkenlay (mostly consisting of a richer gray-slate soil). Within Fahrlay, he also makes an old-vine cuvée called Fahrlay-Terrassen (from terraces). Likewise, he has two old-vine plots within Falkenlay that he bottles separately, namely the steep-terraced Felsterrasse as well as Raffes. Towards the castle he culls from an individual plot of vines, in certain years, a wine called “Noar.”

All his wines, which come from vines farmed organically since 1984, ferment spontaneously for a long time (usually till mid-August) on their fine lees in either stainless-steel tanks or large traditional barrels (Fuder).

Clemens and his wife, Rita, live in a restored half-timbered house built in 1663 on the banks of the Mosel in Pünderich.