Philip and Rosa Lardot are working just over four hectares in no fewer than seven different villages in the Mosel, each one more obscure than the other.
Yet it is exactly this obscurity that makes their work all the more critical. Without them, many (all?) of these vineyards would go fallow.
Here are some villages in the Mosel (my beloved “Mystery Mosel” if ya heard of it?) that you’ve likely never heard of: Briedel, Briedern, Ediger, Neef, Pünderich, Sainkt Aldegund, and Zell.
These are stunning sites (see the photograph below for ***** sake) awash with old, ungrafted vines, filled with the ancient genetic heritage of the Mosel. Yet, they have no fame, no recognition. This, obviously, makes the business of selling much more difficult. We like our damn “Bernkasteler Doctor.”
Here, there is no easy sales hook, no fame or commercial resonance to help the wines in what has become a brutal marketplace.
And so all we can do is fucking yell: SAVE THE MOSEL.
I know I’ve been barking about this for a while, but we are nay upon the zero hour for many of these sites. Rosa and Philip are the cavalry; there’s no one else coming. And we’re only going to get so many chances to heed their call. If this sounds formidable, and scary, it is. Yet also remember the fucking thrill of it is that we get to participate in a profound act of cultural preservation and we get to taste the story being written, right now.
And if the short story involves a 2013 harvest in which our own Collin Wagner, who is now something of German-wine-sales royalty, a colleague here at vom Boden and a dear friend, brought a young Philip Lardot to work his first harvest in the Mosel, well, the longer story is a bit more complicated. This becomes in fact a love story involving another American (Rosalie Curtin) who would move to the Mosel in 2022 to work with Lardot, marry him in 2025, and eventually become an integral part of the story, rebranding the estate as simply “Lardot” with a whole new wine-hierarchy and new labels in early 2026.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The fact that Lardot is a Finnish-born, Amsterdam-raised, introspective, pentalingual, autodidact and Curtin a NYC architect-in-training who gave up the Ivy league to work with wine in the Sierra Foothills doesn’t make the story any simpler.
But so it goes; we have some time.
The beginning for Philip is clear enough. Philip came to the Mosel and did his first harvest with Collin at Clemens Busch in 2013. Something important happened during this harvest – what exactly that was is harder to articulate. Regardless, Philip quickly decided to quit his job back in Amsterdam and return to work in the Mosel with Clemens through 2014.
The wine bug had sunk its teeth in; there was no going back to a normal life.
2015 and 2016 involved apprenticeships at places like Henri Milan, Bernard Baudry and Bertrand Jousset, though Chenin didn’t do it for him like the Riesling did (with apologies and love to Pascaline). So back to Germany Philip went in the spring of 2016. He went there with few plans: only to learn, to taste as much as he could and, hopefully, someday, to make some wines.
He ended up really digging these “Stein wines” and buying a lot of them at the cellar door. That’s where the relationship between Lardot and Stein began. Lardot began making his own wines while working for Stein (his first vintage is 2016). For nearly five years the two of them worked together, yet after the 2022 harvest the two decided to part ways and Lardot focused solely on his own wines.
Now, at the exact moment Lardot left Stein, well, he needed help. The Mosel is, after all, more than anything else, a place of labor. Many of the steepest sites simply cannot be farmed mechanically; there is a lot of work that must be done by hand. And so it was that in the summer of 2022 Rosalie Curtin came to the Mosel, with a few others, to spend maybe a few months helping Lardot in the vineyards.
Curtin had come to the Mosel via stints in Oregon (with Jess Miller and Maloof among others) and with Frenchtown Farms in the Sierra Foothills. While the foothills were beautiful, Curtin felt like it was crazy, at her age and without anything really tying herself down, to not travel to Europe to work there, to learn there. Riesling had always been somewhere in her brain, and in fact she came to a “Rieslingstudy” that Robert Dentice organized in Chicago in the winter of 2021… only a few weeks after that, Lardot posted that he was looking for help and that was that. The decision was made.
For Curtin, and for many, Lardot’s wines were and are something of a revelation. There is no denying that Philip’s wines are wines of exploration, wines that push and pull expectations of what the Mosel is, or can be. Yet it’s also important to realize that as “new” as these wines feel, there are precedents. Stein, Melsheimer, and Trossen had been experimenting with a number of the techniques that Lardot employs for decades before Philip began. It’s also important to note that these techniques are not even slightly radical. They are in fact wildly traditional in essentially every wine region except the Mosel. These techniques include long(er) élevages on the full lees, bottling unfined and unfiltered and with lower levels of S02.
One has to keep in mind, however, that the signature Mosel acidity and form, that ultra-linear, lime-green acid-shockwave comes from blocking malolactic. And so while Lardot’s technique is laughably commonplace, it is perhaps somewhat radical in the context of the Mosel wines we’ve come to know in the post-war period.
Yet Lardot’s argument against blocking malo has a good amount of logic: the Mosel is a cool climate, producing high acidities to begin with. Then you have a grape like Riesling which has one of the highest levels of natural acidity of any grape. Why do you want to block malolatic to accentuate the acidity more? (The answer, of course, is to accentuate the acidity even more.) But blocking malolactic can require a bit more S02, some filtering and the like, so Philip just leaves the wines alone, on their full lees, for quite some time, until bottling. The wines are bottled unfiltered; most see just a little bit of S02 at bottling only.
The general Lardot aesthetic – and I mean the style developed by both Philip and Rosa – presents wines of a gauzy, airy textures, though they can be quite saturating as well. As they have developed, the wines have more structure, a growing depth, deep, deep clarity, a gushing minerality. These are Rieslings that are not milky or heavy by any means, but that are more coating and layered. The skin-fermented Pinot Gris is a humble revelation, tart red fruit and sous bois with a crispy acidity.
Their Pinot Noirs are brisk and alpine; these are among the most compelling reds in the Mosel, at once saturating yet also delicate, effusive. The Kabinett Trocken of Pinot Noirs.
All the wines have a meditative, glowing, whispering sorta feel to them, presenting the Mosel not as a lighting bolt, but as a misty, soulful, contemplative place, deep with mineral and mystery.
Which it is.
The “Kontakt” wines are the entry-level wines. There is a white “Kontakt” that will be a blend of grapes, Riesling of course, but also Müller-Thurgau, Auxerrois, Johanniter. There will also be, vintage allowing, a red or rosé “Kontakt” made from Pinot Noir. While there are certain parcels that always go into these wines, the “Kontakt” wines can also receive random single-vineyard barrels, booster shots of top-level juice that Lardot declassifies.
Then there will be a blue-labeled set of variety-specific bottlings: a Riesling, a Pinot Gris, a Pinot Noir.
And then, finally, the single-vineyard wines. This is really the heart of the project; a contemporary love letter to the Mosel… and in the end, though this wreaks of a Hallmark card gone off the rails, a love affair among Philip and Rosa and the Mosel.
If, as I’ve alluded to, there are parts of this narrative that feel avant-garde or non-traditional, in another way the wines are profoundly classical. These top bottlings are, for the most part, single-vineyard Rieslings that have as their main concern, the place from which they come. Because they are bottled unfiltered and can be a touch cloudy, they would be subject to the rejection of the very conservative tasting panels of the Mosel. Thus they are bottled as “Landwein der Mosel” and are not allowed to carry their place-name. So they have fantasy names that allude to the place from which they come.
We should focus on three single-vineyard Rieslings: “Eichberg” which is sourced from the Rüberberger Domherrenberg. No, you’ve never heard of this place or this vineyard site. If you have: Wow. You are legit a Mosel dork. Welcome.
Then two sites which you hopefully already know and love via Dr. Ulli Stein: The St. Aldegunder Himmelreich, which Philip and Rosa call “Am Bach” as their parcel is edged, as it were, by a little creek that cuts down the hillside – “Bach” is the German word for stream or creek.
Finally, the St. Aldegunder Palmberg is called “Alte Kirche,” honoring the Romanesque chapel at the foot of the vineyard built it 1144.
For a who’s who trip around this most curious and special part of the Mosel, please see our Google Earth tour. You won’t regret it.
In the last few years Rosa and Philip have fine-tuned their holdings, their vineyard work, their cellar work.
They are working just over four hectares in no fewer than seven different villages, each one more obscure than the other: Briedel, Briedern, Ediger, Neef, Pünderich, Sainkt Aldegund, and Zell. This obscurity makes their work all the more critical; without them many of these vineyards would and will go fallow. Yet it also makes their work all the harder: There is no easy sales hook, no fame or commercial resonance to help the wines in the brutal marketplace.
And so all we can do is fucking yell: SAVE THE MOSEL. We’re only going to get so many chances to heed the call. The fucking thrill of it all, is that we get to participate in a profound act of cultural preservation and we get to taste the story being written, right now.
