Markus Molitor

Markus Molitor took over his father's winery in 1984, aged twenty, with one and a half hectares in the Wehlener Klosterberg. Forty years later he farms some one hundred and twenty hectares across fifteen sites in the Middle Mosel and the Saar —Wehlen, Zeltingen-Rachtig, Bernkastel— many of them top-classified, which makes it one of the largest privately owned estates on the Mosel. On those slopes there are still ungrafted vines around a hundred years old.

The estate solved on its own a classic problem of German wine: that the label does not always make clear how much sugar is in the bottle. Molitor encodes it in the capsule. White for dry, grey-green for off-dry and gold for naturally sweet. There is no need to read the back label: the colour says it from the shelf.