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Perhaps we got lulled into complacency with the string of fine vintages starting in 1988. For awhile it looked like I’d found a motherlode of reliably superb Mosel wine, and then it didn’t want to rain any more, and then it rained too much. Nature needs to be much kinder to these people, because they care and you can’t conceive of how hard they work in these austere ter-races. Konrad Hähn and his estate have garnered a following over here. I don’t really need to tell the “how-I-ended-up-in-this-east-b.f.-place” story any more, now that y’all know they make good wine this far downriver. But viticulture along the lower Mosel has challenges of its own, and it’s worth at least a cursory glance at this sub-district.

The first challenge is the sheer ridiculous steepness of most of these sites. They put the perp in perpendicular! Plus they’re on centuries-old terraces and can never be flurbereinigt. The local expedient has been to build the monorack, which is basically a little set of wagons run by a diesel engine mounted to a rack, which coughs and sputters its way up the vertiginous slopes. You ride facing down (i.e. backwards as you ascend) so you can buttress your feet against the back of the cart. When the rack traverses a wall the angle is nearly vertical and your heart is in your shoes. You wonder (when you’re not gawking at the views) why did our forbears decide to grow grapes in such forbidding conditions when it would seem to have been equally plausible to plant vines on the valley floor. Probably because they didn’t have TV.

These are the furthest d o w n s t ream of all Mosel vineyards. Any further and y o u ’ re in the suburbs of Koblenz. It may be the heat-island effect from the near-by city that makes these the warmest vineyards on the Mosel. The average must-weights are higher here, and regional co-ops pay a premium for these grapes. Or it may be that only the best sites are tilled anymore, and most of the vines are ungrafted. It’s worth the journey just to see the terraces. The wines from these sites taste inimitably like great Mosel wines, with an extra expression of miner-ality that recalls licorice or lemon-grass. There’s a vein of red clay running through the Uhlen vineyard, giving those wines a redcurranty, earthy richness. The Weisenberg site produces the ballerinas.

Konrad Hähn is a serious, thoughtful man. He seems to take little for granted, doesn’t do things merely because that’s how Things Are Done. His fruit is cleaned and gently pressed, then fermented with cultured yeasts and vitamin B, in order to keep sulfur levels down later on. Fermentation is as slow as possible: “High temperatures destroy aroma molecules,” say Konrad. Also, “if you have too much carbonate evaporation you take aroma out of the wine. We never bottle with sorbic acid. First you don’t need to do it if your vivification is clean; second, we feel that despite all advertising you do taste it.” Konrad is also a rarity among Mosel growers; he’s a defender of Süssreserve. “Completely fermented wines have the lowest amount of fermentation by-products. Süssreserve doesn’t add such things, because it never fermented. Süssreserve has a bad image because people were sloppy with it, but we use only Riesling, we make it only by cold filtration, and it’s at least the same or better quality than the wine.” Since 1989 all fertilizing has been organic, and will con-tinue as long as it works. The cellar is reductive: only tanks. Now and again a wine’s fermentation is sponta-neously interrupted, particularly at the Auslese level. Konrad accepts this, but grudgingly. Wines with their own sweetness have a certain creaminess he finds troublesome. He likes sleek, snappy wines, and that’s the sort of wine he makes.

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