A German Riesling Wine Tasting

Weingut Max Ferd Richter

The estate of Weingut Max Ferd. Richter has been passed down from father to son for the past 300 years. The current reins are held by Dr. Dirk Richter, the 9th generation, and has slowly been passed down to his son Constantin. Max Ferd. Richter produces world-class Rieslings from some of the most esteemed vineyards in the Mosel, and all production comes from estate holdings. Additionally, they produce two top monopole vineyards: Mülheimer Helenenkloster and Veldenzer Elisenberg. Mülheimer Helenenkloster is considered by many to be among the best Eiswein vineyards in Germany.

The possession of Veldenzer Elisenberg dates back to 1813 when ancestor Franz Ludwig Niessen found out that Napoleon Bonaparte planned on uprooting the beloved Veldenz and Mulheim vineyards, and negotiated a personal payment to the General to prevent him from destroying the vineyards. As thanks, the town gave him the entire slope of Veldenzer Elisenberg and it has remained in the family ever since.

The terroir of their steep vineyard sites is generally grey slate with different compositions of ferruginous (Brauneberg), mineral quartz (Veldenz) or clay (Graach, Wehlen, Mülheim) soils; those deeply influence character and flavor of the wines. In order to reduce quantity and increase concentration, pruning is severe and in prolific years a green harvest is carried out in August. The vintage is picked much later than that of most growers and is done entirely by hand. Three passes are done to select the best qualities to eliminate all inferior grapes and to keep perfect botrytis bunches or single berries for Auslese qualities and above. The same attention is paid to all vines from the QBAs on up through the Eisweins. Through the entire line of wines, their hallmark balance is evident in every glass.

The Mosel
The vines which grow on the banks of the Mosel (Moselle in French) and its tributaries the Saar and the Ruwer constitute Germany’s third biggest wine region in terms of area, but arguably its most important in terms of international prestige and dependence on viticulture. No other crop could economically be grown on the steepest, finest vineyards, and many of the thousands of small-scale vine growers in the region complain that vines are hardly economic at today’s low prices. Some vineyards have even been abandoned and the overall vineyard area is gradually declining as vineyard workers become increasingly difficult to find. The large modern bottling plants which have sprouted in this extraordinary, green, essentially rural landscape process so much wine that the Mosel has become Germany’s most important source of wine, even if by no means all of it was grown in the Mosel, or even Germany. The tourist village of Bernkastel is well used to supertankers thundering through it.
The Upper Mosel valley is uncannily like the English Lake District, with its late-Victorian mansions, slate and water everywhere, its permanent residents mainly nth generation farmers or caterers to the needs, real and confected, of the swarms of tourists attracted to the region.
This picture-postcard, steep-sided valley follows the meandering Mosel river, folding the land into such an irregular concertina that without the sun, visitors can be completely disorientated. Local vine growers, on the other hand, know that the great Riesling grape can be ripened only on the sunniest south- and south-west-facing sites, steep enough and close enough to the river to benefit from its function as mirror, on porous slate soils which not only drain away the region’s frequent surplus rainfall, but also retain daytime heat to act as night storage heaters.
These are the most labour-intensive vineyards in the world, requiring about seven times as many man-hours as, for example, the flat vineyards of the Médoc. In the Mosel it is said that each stake, up which individual vines are trained in order to allow vineyard workers the flexibility to work the vineyard on the horizontal rather than the more tiring vertical, must be visited at least seven times each year. Some of the slopes are so steep and so irregular that over the years some vineyard workers have even lost their lives tending these tenacious vines.