Harvest Time at Markus Molitor

“It is a group operation,” Leon Michaelis exclaimed as he slipped into the back seat of the car that Marcel Zaschka, a cellar hand at Weingut Markus Molitor, was driving. Leon, who works in the Vinothek (tasting room or wine shop in German), was holding the keys to the apartment I would be staying in for almost the next two weeks. The keys clanked as he climbed into the back seat of the car we were in, his wide grin visible even in the darkness.

Little did I knew how true that sentence is for the entire operation.

It is often an assumption that with scale comes a loss in quality. That cannot be further away from the truth for Markus Molitor.

The story of Markus Molitor is an impressive one. Markus took over from his father at the young age of 20, with a modest 1.5 hectares of Wehlener Klosterberg in 1984. Four decades later, he has grown their vineyard holdings to 80 times the size of what it was.

The “Right Hand”

Markus is the eighth generation of winemakers in the Molitor family. When he was a teenager, his father Werner lost his right arm. “He needed support and help in the vineyard and cellar, so I became his right hand,” Markus says. He spent every free minute in the winery with his father.

In the 1980s, the Mosel wine industry was devastated by crisis and few were willing or able to work these back-breaking steep vineyards. For the first time in history, plots in the famous Grand Cru sites that families had passed down for generations were offered for sale or rent. Markus took the chance, growing from 1.5 hectares to approximately 20.

One day, Markus and his father stood at the foot of the Zeltinger Sonnenuhr and looked up. His father spoke of the glory days of Mosel Riesling at the beginning of the twentieth century. The vines in those parcels, about 100 years old, were still the same.

“I asked myself: What has happened? Why do the wines not have the same reputation although the preconditions have not changed at all?” Markus shares.

Since then, his ambition has been to restore the wines of the Mosel to their former glory.

It has always fascinated me how the management of such a vast piece of land works, and doing harvest with Weingut Markus Molitor has always been on my harvest bucket list. I sent a text to Export Director Daniel Kiowski, who quickly responded with a string of voice messages, and the next thing I know it was readily arranged. All that’s left is to get myself to Germany. And so I did.

The House Is The Winery

Years ago when I first visited Weingut Markus Molitor, I remember the awestruck feeling of walking up the towering grey slate house of Haus Klosterberg and marvelling at the sight of the town of Zeltingen-Rachtig around me.

Walking through the front door, what struck me was how the family’s own living quarters are on the right side of the entrance, while to the left is the Vinothek, their cellar door tasting room that hosts visitors. Markus and the estate are one. So are the family’s lives.

Carmen Mady Flammang “runs Markus’ private life” as many of the team put it. But she is also so much more than Markus’ wife. During the harvest, Carmen would fetch their kids around for football practice and to school, all while helping out sorting grapes and making dinner for the cellar team. Luxembourg-born and fluent in French, she occasionally represents both the estate and Domaine Serrig (an estate that Markus acquired in Saar) at events.

The glass of choice at the estate, both in the cellar and tasting room, is Josephinenhütte. For an operation of this size, they could have settled for any other lower-cost machine-made glass. Yet, they chose this mouth-blown piece from Kurt Josef Zalto that is made in Europe.

Markus is uncompromising when it comes to quality, which often comes with a higher price to pay. The first time I picked one up, I could not help but nod in resonance.