Dr. Loosen

The Loosen family has a continuous history in Bernkastel since 1808, more than two hundred years in the same house. The modern turning point came in 1988, when Ernst Loosen —Ernie— took charge of a neglected estate at twenty-nine, abandoning his archaeology studies to return to the Mosel.

What he found on arriving explains everything he did next: ungrafted vines averaging some sixty years in several of Germany's finest sites. On the Mosel the slate spared much of the vineyard from phylloxera, so the vines still stand on their own roots. His decision was to keep only that: he pulled out the young plantings, concentrated on old ungrafted Riesling —some of it predating 1900— and cut yields by seventy per cent.

He farms six Grosse Lage, the VDP's top classification of sites. Among them the Graacher Himmelreich, source of the wine we carry here, where the vines average one hundred and thirty years old.