The 2023 Enderle & Moll wines have arrived; this will be the last vintage.

This short essay is I guess my small tribute, a sad goodbye. This is one final effort to give these two the credit they deserve and to say thank you for the wines they shaped, the culture of German Spätburgunder they changed.

For me, Sven and Florian started, pictured below in a photograph from 2014, marked, and perhaps changed, the course for German Spätburgunder for the next decades.

When I first tasted these wines back in 2008 or 2009, they were nothing short of a revelation. I remember exactly where I was when I tasted the first one: at the now-defunct Seasonal Restaurant in New York with Dan Melia of the also-now-defunct Mosel Wine Merchant. He had brought a bottle of the 2007 Enderle & Moll to pour. I worked in wine retail at the time and this was Dan’s pitch to myself and my partner-wine-buyer at the time Joe Salamone. By the end of the meal, I believe, Joe and I had become the first buyers of Enderle & Moll in the U.S.

For me, and for Joe I think, when we tasted these wines the needle jumped the groove and the music stopped; the mic dropped.

Enderle & Moll had found the path forward.

I think back to the early 2000s, to years of tasting German Spätburgunders with great curiosity (and, it must be said, most often with great disappointment). Enderle & Moll was the first estate I tasted that so clearly offered a counter-narrative to what most Spätburgunder was at that moment.

Where most German Spätburgunder valued dense color, extraction, smooth, round edges and voluminous textures, Enderle & Moll’s Pinots were alarmingly light in color and extraction, and often times angular and structured.

In a world that valued plush, ripe fruit, Enderle & Moll seemed to focus on soil tones, bramble, herbs, minerals.

When most growers in Germany hadn’t really heard of natural wine, or had nonchalantly dismissed it, Enderle & Moll quickly and instinctively found the value and insight to be had here, taking from this movement many of the ideas that are now unquestionably accepted by even the most “classic” of contemporary winegrowers: a focus on selection massale, vine age, organic or at least very thoughtful farming, a more delicate élevage, a more considered curation of quality barrels, often used, often from Burgundy, bottling unfined and unfiltered when possible.

In a German Spätburgunder world that still seemed to focus on ripeness above all, on late-harvesting to produce the biggest wines possible (“Spätburgunder Auslese Trocken” if you will), Enderle & Moll focused on the quality of the site and didn’t seem to care at all about the potential or finished alcohol.

As an aside, they also applied these red-winemaking techniques (skin-contact, etc.) to the white grapes they farmed and bottled these, hmmm, what would I call them? Skin-contact wines with an orange-ish hue? This was ten years before “orange wines” would become a category. I had never seen nor tasted white wines with such texture and structure outside of Friuli. Unlike most Friulian wines, however, they bottled their whites in clear bottles, flaunting the orange-wine colors.

These are just the facts.

Now, I’m not a winemaker. I don’t live in Germany full-time. I can’t honestly speak of how influential the wines of Enderle & Moll were. They seem to get a lot less credit than the micro-production wines of Henrik Möbitz, for reasons I don’t quite understand. Möbitz’s wines were lovely; I met with him and tasted his wines extensively back in the day. I climbed the ladder down into his micro-cellar. Yet Enderle  Moll, it seems to me, produced much more wine, of a very similar quality level, over a longer period of time.