Enderle & Moll "Spätburgunder" Baden, Germany 2023

FROM VOM BODEN:

THE WINE: 100% Spatburgunder (Pinot Noir). The Spatburgunder Rosé is always one of the most beguiling and transfixing wines from E & M, it can be as structured as the Basis. From 50 year old vines on limestone and sandstone. this sees 5 days of maceration on the skins before being pressed into barrel. A sub-genre of rosé we really enjoy: bottles released a year post-vintage. With time in bottle the fruit deepens and grows more complex – this is almost a Clos Cibonne style – very herbal and dark fruited, tons of soil tones. Honestly drinks more like a red than a rosé. Bonkers good and culty.

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.