Philip Lardot, Riesling Die Winzerin, 2022
is backordered and will ship as soon as it is back in stock.
Welcome to the delectable debut of "Die Winzerin", Philip and Rosalie's expression of Palmberg-Terrassen in Sankt Aldegund.
This wine deserves a bit of context. Ulli Stein, the majority owner of the vineyard has painstakingly cared for this incredible, under-rated, Grand Cru quality site for decades. He was always considered a maverick, bucking the norms of the systems, and fighting the archaic rules of the German governments. Stein's winemaking was also radical for a time, as he crafted some of the first, and arguably the best dry wines in the Mosel, while his peers leaned in to the residual sugar. Which makes Stein Wine Palmberg-Terrassen is the benchmark of the vineyard and for dry Riesling in the Mosel.
Die Winzerin is the flip side of the same coin, or what you get once you break all the other Mosel boundaries and want to see the site with a little artifice as possible, using totally non-traditional techniques. It is bone dry, crackling with energy and acidity. Cold blue and gray slate minerality oozes out of the wine, with barely perceptible whispers of lemon, lime pith and golden apple. There is a shockingly severe steely edge to this wine, that we expect to slightly soften with some more time in bottle, but for now makes the wine feel like a laser pointer across your palate. There is depth and breadth to this wine, as there should be from such an incredible vineyard, but it has turned out even more stunning than expected.
From a tiny .3 hectare plot, this is the crown jewel of their holdings. Named in honor of the many unnamed women who have worked these terraces for centuries. It is aged for 22 months in tonneau, and only racked once at the 18 month mark.
