Julian Haart - 'Landwein der Mosel' Weissburgunder 2021 (750ml)

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Producer	Julian Haart
Country	Germany
Region	Mosel
Varietal	Weissburgunder
Vintage	2021
Size	750ml

Julian’s first vintage under his own label was in 2010 and people immediately took notice. Although none of the wine was released in the U.S., David Schildknecht, writing for Parker’s Wine Advocate at the time, penned the following: “Not many wine careers can have started off on a more superlative level than Haart’s, yet from my several conversations with him I am convinced that his perfectionism goes hand in hand with rigorous self-criticism that should preclude success going to his head.”

For the record, since vintage 2010 the wines have only gotten better, and while few cases are released in the U.S. every year, Julian is earning a pretty serious following. And it hasn’t gone to his head – he’s still as cool as shit.

Julian’s first vineyard buy was an awesome parcel, top center, in the grand cru site Ohligsberg, just downstream from the Goldtröpfchen (see below). The following year (2011), Haart expanded the estate with two grand cru sites, the Goldtröpfchen and Schubertslay. The Goldtröpfchen parcel includes terraces established in the early 20th century and the Schuberstlay, one of the smallest single-vineyards in all of the Mosel with only about one hectare under vine, flaunts ungrafted vines around 100 years old. This is serious terroir. So serious, in fact, that as of vintage 2018 Julian has handed the Schubertslay vineyard over to one of his best friends, this guy Klaus Peter Keller (ya heard of him?). This will be Keller’s first Mosel wine, which is a huge deal. In return, with vintage 2018, Julian will make a small amount of wine from Keller’s Frauenberg vineyard in the Rheinhessen.

It’s worth noting that I have met few more serious winemakers. Even though Julian has made more than a few jaw-dropping wines, most of his tastings end with him telling you what he would have done differently, where he thinks he failed, how he could have done better. Schildknecht’s phrase about “rigorous self-criticism” begins to feel like a bit of an understatement.

The estate has grown to a little more than four hectares and this is, roughly, where Julian wants it to stay. Part of the joy of winemaking, for Julian, is doing everything, just he and his wife Nadine, and maybe some friends. This is vineyard work, and winemaking, at the most human scale. Nearly everything must be done by hand – most of the vineyards are steep as hell and most of them are terraced. Even walking through them is a bit hazardous.

As with Lauer, it makes sense to speak of the “terroir wines” and the “Prädikat wines” as two distinct categories. The terroir wines are those that ferment naturally, finding their own balance that is nearly always dry tasting, though the wines might have a lil’ more sugar than would allow them to be legally called “Trocken,” or dry. In this grouping of wines we begin with the “1000L.” This wine is made from Fuder(s) of Julian’s wines that he doesn’t think are good enough for any of the above classifications. Thus I buy the entire Fuder (the traditional 1,000 liter barrel of the Mosel) and call the wine “1000L.” From here we progress up the Burgundian ladder, from “Moselle” (appellation level), “Piesporter” or “Wintricher” (village-level) up to the grand cru, single-vineyard bottlings “Goldtröpfchen” and “Ohligsberg.”

The Prädikat wines are labelled simply enough, from Kabinett up to Auslesen (rarely seen), always designated by the vineyard.

The overall style is clearly a type of Mosel-hommage to Keller. The wines showcase a glossy, super-pure fruit that shrieks across the palate with a pushing, sharply delineated acidity. Pulverized slate, polished to a fine dust, coats everything.

These are Moselle wines of consequence, well worth the perhaps difficult time you’ll have actually trying to find a bottle.

Wine Notes: The easy and trite way of approaching this wine is to simply frame it as something like: “This is Julian Haart’s natural wine.” Which in some ways is true. The wine was basket-pressed and saw skin and stem contact; it had extended lees contact. It was bottled unfined and unfiltered very late in the year; there wasn’t much sulfur used. The curious thing is that in some ways this is the recipe for Julian’s Grand Cru dry Rieslings, the “GGs.” They are normally basket-pressed and can see a rather extreme process involving skin and stem contact. In other words, in certain ways this wine is unlike anything Julian Haart has ever made before, though in other ways the wine has striking similarities to the extreme phenolic density, the structure and the architecture of the top Grand Cru Rieslings.

Yet this bottling is mostly Weissburgunder. So if the architecture of the wine – the lightness and grip – is comparable to Julian’s Grand Cru Rieslings, the interior design is wildly different. Here we have a broader, more rustic and meatier feel, a waxy, resinous and saline mid-palate awash with glowing yellow fruit, dried spices, floral elements and a dark and quixotic minerality. Most importantly, the wine retains that essential Haart quality of supreme drinkability, a clear mineral-water essentialness that feels revitalizing.

If this is just a white wine, then why is it a “Landwein der Mosel?” The answer is easy: because the wines are unfiltered and can often be cloudy. And this “cloudiness” is seen by the authorities as not typical of the Mosel, so these wines cannot be “Qualitätswein.” Using the “Landwein” classification is easy enough, and this is used by growers such as Philip Lardot, Jakob Tennstedt, Jonas Dostert, Julien Reynard and Wolfram Stempel in the Mosel as well as growers such as Wasenhaus, etc. in other parts of Germany. The downside of using the “Landwein” designation is that you cannot reference place, neither the village nor the vineyard.