Enderle & Moll "Liaison" Pinot Noir, Baden, Germany 2023

FROM VOM BODEN:

THE WINE: Liaison, something like Enderle & Moll’s “1er Cru” bottling, from vines 60 years old and older (what a country due west might call Vieilles-Vignes) planted on the two predominant soil types down here in Baden: colored sandstone and shell limestone. A “Liaison” of soil types if you will. It is always one of the most compelling Pinots out there, an absurd value that easily out-classes wines that are twice the price. Ruby and vibrant in the glass – this is unmistakably PURE Pinot. On the palate the wine is very fine and delineated, deeply soil driven. The tannins are woven and very much in focus, fruit is more purple and blue than that of Basis’s pure red and the wine is very moreish.

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.