One of my favorite visits of the Germany trip? This one. Willi Schaefer. Graach, Mosel. Baller status.
On our last day, perhaps my favorite day of all, we spent our hours in the heart of the Mosel visiting three fantastic winemakers. Willi Shaefer was our second stop of the day and an eye opener. Literally, my eyes might have been slightly too wide to look normal for an extended amount of time during the visit.
We drove up to the Dompropst vineyard, which houses some of Schaefer’s 4 total hectares of land, and checked out a crap ton of blue slate, talked crazy inclines, pH and the Mosel-Heart. Background info: the estate has been in Willi’s family since 1121, the winery is named after his grandfather, current Willi started making wine in 1971 and his son Christoph (middle name Willi) stepped in to help in 2002.
We headed back down to the cellar and got to tasting. The wine below is probably the best Grosses Gewachs I tasted all week. Since, you know, I am an authority on all things GG. I didn’t really know exactly what Grosses Gewachs was until I got to Germany.
Willi made only one fuder (foudre) of this wine, which holds 1,000 liters. That’s around 1,300 bottles or 111 cases. Nothing! It was the purest of the pure in both slate-y minerality and fruit. Talia said, quite accurately and poetically, that the wine was “so pure, it is just pulling you through it.”
The Schaefer’s ferment with native yeasts, age on the gross lees for a handful of months and then on the fine lees for a few more after that, use a mixture of stainless steel and cask and add sulfur after fermentation and not again.
We got a little lucky. Willi said he had a bottle of his son’s birth year Beerenauslese (1976) open and would we like to taste? Yeah, we would. Such a treat to be able to see a Riesling like this as it can be, how it changes and evolves with time. The aromatics were so complex- savory, sweet, earthy, tangy, spicy, leafy. Tasting it, the acidity-fruit-minerality-sweetness marriage was seamless.
Before we left, we headed downstairs for a peek at the Super Special Schaefer cellar, home to a lot of really old stuff that anyone would kill to get their hands on. It’s like a library of deliciousness. And mold. But amazing mold.
Praise be to the Willi. Halleluyer.