Last night I brought along a bottle of 2007 Maison Pierre Overnoy (Emmanuel Houillon) Chardonnay from the Jura region to my friend Stefan’s place to watch the Champions League final between Bayern and Inter. It was purchased by a wine-maker friend of ours at the domaine. The wine already had an orange color and an oxidized taste—a far cry from the excellent 2001 (clear, crisp, and clean) and the very good ’04, which Dany Bertin-Denis of Les Enfants Rouge once decanted and poured alongside the Savagnin. In fact, I even preferred the more opulent 2006 Chardonnay from Overnoy to the ’07. Fortunately, we had other wines to drink, including a newly bottled 2008 Pinot Noir from Günther Steinmetz. This has only 12% alcohol and is quite closed down after bottling, but so impressive. I’ve always been critical of Steinmetz’s Pinot Noirs, but his 2007s marked a change in style. And the 2008 Pinots might be his best ever.

Today, I’m taking the train from Trier to Winningen to partake in Knebel’s 2009 vintage presentation.

Below is our vintage 2009 summary for the Mosel-Saar region:

A frosty January was followed by a warm April and an early budbreak. In June, many areas of the Mosel region had an uneven and long flowering, resulting in tiny shot berries (often good for quality), but reducing yields. This was due to strong rains and a drop in temperatures followed by mild humid conditions with fears of peronospora (downy mildew), which affected Riesling in certain communes of the Middle Mosel. By September, it became drier and warmer, ideal for the grapes’ ripening (especially old vines with their deeper roots in the steep slate slopes), leading up to an early harvest in mid-October under sunny skies and cool nights. Most vintners, who were selective with multiple passes in the vineyards, picked at ideal ripeness levels, despite fears of rot, and finished by the beginning of November before the rains came. Botrytis was minimal. The healthy Riesling grapes had marked aromatics and the subsequent fermenting musts were remarkably fruity. The vintage has more similarities with 2005 than 2008. The latter is a leaner, classic year with pronounced acidity, and the 2009s have more fruitiness from the start. On the Saar, there was frost in October, and only a band of sites nearer the river were unaffected and kept their leaves.  Nonetheless, the best Saar Rieslings and certain wines of the Mosel, often from side valleys, have a noticeable mineral tension, between fruit and acidity. It’s indeed an excellent vintage.

Photo: Harvesters climbing up Peter Lauer’s site in Schonfels on the Saar, one of the few vineyards in the area that kept its leaves after the October 2009 frost.

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.

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.