From our last blog post you can see Jana and I are having a grand time in Europe. After making a small detour through Dublin, we are now visiting fellow friends and wine makers, Markus and Sybille Kuntz on the Mosel. Believe it or not, the cheapest way to get to the Mosel from Prague is by Ryan Air via Dublin, so we stopped for a few pints of Guinness.
I got to know Markus when he was making great Rieslings for a winery in New York's Finger Lake region. About 12 years ago he went home to Germany to take over a famous old Estate Winery in Trier where he met Sybille. They are now producing some of the best dry style Rieslings from their vineyards in Lieser and Bernkastel on the Mosel. You always wonder who those poor grape growers are that have to farm those unbelievable steep vineyards rising straight up out of the banks of the Mosel. Now you know, its Markus and Sybille toiling away to bring us wonderful dry Rieslings.
We ate and drank our way through two wonderful days. We started with their every day Spatlese troken Riesling. The wine is produced from their four main vineyard sites with an average vine age of over 40 years old. The wine cost 9.5 EUR and has a residual sugar of .8% with an acid of .77. If you go back to the Riesling blog I posted a while back, I talk about a new taste scale developed by the International Riesling Foundation. Aaccording to the International Riesling taste scale this wine is dry. We quickly finished that bottle and moved on to three vintages (2003, 2005 & 2007) of their Gold-Quadrat troken Riesling. This is what they call their Power Riesling from old vines being 40 to 60 years old. The wines showed the classic mineral, flinty and spicy character. Price on these wine is around 15 EUR. From here we moved on to Vineyard designated (Lieser Niederberg-Heldon) wines, the best they have to offer. This vineyard produces a dry (troken) wine they call Dreistern (Three Star), and an off dry (feinherb) wine they call Dreistern Goldkapsel. These old non-grafted/own root vines produce a wine that definitely tells the two stories all great wines need to tell. The first is I'm Riesling and the second I'm Mosel. These wines range from 20 to 25 EUR. You can find these wines on their website www.SybilleKuntz.com. They are sold in selected markets in the US. If you email them at weingut@sybillekuntz.de they can tell you which distributors carry their wines in the US. I know in California they are distributed by Regal wines at 800 886-3425. They are wines worth looking for.
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