Julian HaartWeissburgunder “Landwein der Mosel” 2021 (750ml)

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.