Enderle & Moll "Grauburgunder" Baden, Germany 2022

FROM VOM BODEN:

THE WINE: From 45 year old vines on limestone and sandstone. 5 day maceration on the skins, then a soft pressing into neutral barrel and into steel tank with 25% of the skins. It matures for 10 months on the lees and skins before a super-light filtration and a tiny amount of sulfur at bottling. While this is markedly darker than the other wines in the lineup, this is solely from the pigment in the skins – it doesn’t see significant extra maceration time.

THE PRODUCER: In Germany many insiders consider Enderle & Moll the country’s single greatest producer of Pinot Noir. That’s a wild claim to be sure, but then you taste the wines and you think to yourself, “…yeah, alright, well maybe…”

The wines are that compelling.

What you can say with certainty is that Florian Moll, along with his partner Géraldine, fly in the face of just about every conventional estate in Baden.

Sure, the landscape has changed a lot in the last 15 years, with producers like Hendrik Möbitz, Shelter and Wasenhaus. But when they started in 2007, what they were doing was for all intents and purposes blasphemy. Truly, it’s hard to emphasize how contrarian (and even confrontational) their vineyard and cellar work appeared to the powerful coops of the region, to say nothing of the “famous” estates who at the time were busy pursuing efficiency, ripeness, size, alcohol and, yes, new oak, with abandon.

From the beginning, the focus here was not on ripeness, but on the age and quality of the vineyard. They work with very old vines. In fact their vines are among the oldest Pinot Noir vines in Baden. They farm all the vineyards organically and biodynamically. Absolutely everything is done by hand in the vineyards and in the cellar. They were among the first to actually request used barrels, seeking a more delicate élevage. Although every winery in Germany now claims to somehow have a DRC barrel or two, Enderle & Moll were among the first to realize that the provenance of the barrels mattered, a lot, and they began, famously, with used Dujac barrels, though of course now they source barrels from around Burgundy. The wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered.