Spätburgunder Arrivals from Mosel, Baden, and Rheinhessen!
4/10/2025
Sven Enderle (Photo: Bryan Garcia)
Historically speaking Spätburgunder, the German name for Pinot Noir, has been grown in Germany for hundreds of years, however it wasn't until the last 10-15 that there has been a much larger prominence of German Pinots on the shelves at stores and on wine lists. Traditionally, you could find most of the Pinot Noir grown in Baden but today things have changed. All over German wine regions you can find what is the most prominent red grape in the country! It is believed that global warming has assisted with this move, as some regions where it previously may have seemed too cold for Pinot, are now allowing the grape to thrive. Today's email offer highlights new incoming wines: Sven Enderle's (previously of Enderle & Moll) inaugural solo vintage, the first release of American native Rosalie Curtin's beautiful Mosel reds, and two wines from Weingut Thörle in the Rheinhessen, where two brothers are making some serious Pinot!
Sven Enderle needs no introduction as a German winemaker. However, his new solo project is new to the U.S. Sven was here in New York just a few weeks ago and his first vintage release of ‘Sven Enderle’ are fantastic!
Chambers Street Wines was one of the first retailers to highlight his initial project when Enderle & Moll first started out, so Sven’s wines are no stranger to the store here, as well as Sven who stopped by to say hello while he was in town. As of right now the project is all negociant, but Sven is only purchasing grapes from those with similar philosophy as him, organically grown with minimal inputs. His winemaking philosophy is fairly simple as there are no pump overs, no additives, just him sourcing the best possible grapes and letting them shine. The vinification is the same across the board, with 100% whole cluster fermentation in 800 liter boxes mashed by foot. Aging is in oak for 15 months before bottling with no fining or filtration, with minimal sulfur at bottling. The barrels range from 225-600L from France, Austria, and Italy. The result are some truly beautiful, expressive wines! Today we are offering his "entry" Pinot Noir sourced from all over Baden alongside his Pinot Noir Keuper, sourced from vines planted only on Keuper soils.
Rosalie Curtin and Philip Lardot (Photo: Vom Boden)
Some notes on Rosalie Curtin from our friend Stephen at Vom Boden: "In the summer of 2022 Rosalie Curtin came to the Mosel, with a few others, to spend maybe a few months helping Lardot and Stein in the vineyards. She had come to this place after 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” 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, Lardot’s wines were something of a revelation - the cliché of the Mosel producing only sweet Riesling is still dominant. Yet Lardot shapes a different expression of the Mosel, following the precedents of Stein, Thorsten Melsheimer and Rita and Rudolf Trossen among others: dry wines, with longer élevages, malolactic conversions, lees aging and no filtering. The wines, in many ways, speak more to the Jura or Chablis than to what people often expect from the Mosel.
If this was a Mosel that Curtin had not expected to find, she also did not expect to fall in love with Philip (they will be married this summer). In the last three years, the two of them have been working very closely together.
This offer, these wines, represent the few parcels, the few barrels that both Curtin and Lardot have farmed together, but that Curtin has made. She is, so far as we know, the first American woman to make wine in the Mosel, which is sorta cool. What's even cooler is the fact that she is focusing on the forgotten villages, the forgotten vineyards of the Mosel, awash in old vines.
This is a labor of love, of passion. These are important wines and this is the first chapter. As you can guess, they are silly-limited." -Stephen Bitterolf Founder of Vom Boden
Christoph and Johannes Thörle (Photo: Weingut Thörle)
Christoph and Johannes Thörle’s ancestors have been in viticulture since the 16th century. The two brothers took over from their parents in 2006 and since then have been increasing manual labor in the vineyards and reducing yields. They switched everything to hand harvesting, and are fermenting with only wild yeast. More recently (2019) farming has all been done organically with 2022 being the first certified organic vintage. Johannes believes that all these changes have led to improving wine quality. Their goal is to showcase the potential of wines from the Rheinhessen with Saulheim's limestone-rich soils and that is exactly what they have done. The wines contain a tiny bit more extraction and aging then more "traditional" styles of Spätburgunder providing more body and darker fruits yet the wines still have incredible lift and energy. Today we have their entry Pinot, a fun, bright, playful style alongside their Saulheim Kalkstein a more smooth, elegant style with great notes of dark cherries and wild berries. As you move up in classification with these wines, Thörle has reminded me the most of Burgundian Pinot Noir.
-Hanna Krilov
