These are truly old-school Mosel Rieslings; in my mind these are the rustic, transparent, bracing – even a touch brutal – Mosel wines that were probably common decades ago. Yet this style has been nearly forgotten, pushed aside by the riper, fruitier, easier style of plush-and-giving Mosel wine.

To my mind, Hermann Ludes, Ulli Stein and Erich Weber are the current canonical masters of this style. The best Ludes wines also have something of the sleek tension, the force that is the calling card of Julian Haart’s wines. Yet perhaps the closest comparison in our book is with the wines of Weiser-Künstler, with their faceted, crystalline and largely mineral-and-earth driven language. Obviously, all the Mosel growers in our portfolio have some relationship to this style – there is a reason we are attracted to all these wines.

Currently, the Hermann Ludes estate is the largest single owner of Thörnich’s Grand Cru Ritsch vineyard, owning most of the old-vine, ungrafted parcels. While the Ritsch does have a prime south, south-west exposure, two side valleys open up on either side of the site, exposing it to the frigid air from the plateau of the Eifel – you can see this quite clearly in the photograph above. This cold air rushes into the vineyard at night; it is demonstrable. During harvest here the acid levels simply do not drop in the same way they do in most of the other sites of the Mosel.

From the village-level Thörnich bottling on up, all the fruit is from steep slopes. Julian and his uncle own a bit more than four hectares in the Ritsch; they also have tiny holdings – a bit more than a hectare total – in the Thörnicher Enggas, Klüsserath Bruderschaft and Pölicher Held. The Ritsch, however, is the diamond in the crown – and a big diamond at that. The average vine age here is about 75 years old, many of the vines are ungrafted. Every site they own in the Ritsch is inaccessible by any machine; terraced vineyards with walls at the top and the bottom. Absolutely everything must be done by hand.

-Stephen Bitterolf, vom Boden

Includes one bottle each of

1999 Kabinett Trocken ‘Klüsserather Bruderschaft’

2022 Kabinett Feinherb ‘Thörnicher Ritsch - Gackes Oben’

2022 Kabinett ‘Thörnicher Ritsch - Monster’

2023 Kabinett ‘Thörnicher Ritsch - Monster’

2023 Spatlese ‘Thörnicher Ritsch - Speyer’

2023 Thornicher