Phillip Lardot - Schiefer, Riesling, Mosel, Germany (2022)

Schiefer (Slate) is a blend of Riesling from multiple sites in the Mosel, 30-40 years old vines, all on grey and blue slate. Here Phil combines fruit that is farmed by a close friend, Michael, the only grower he purchasesfruit from, along with selections from his own vineyards.

Cold macerated for a few hours before pressing, fermentation in barrel on full lees, 14 months of ageing in tonneau.

Longtime protege and assistant to Ulli Stein, Philip employs his own style in making wine, producing Rieslings (and other treats) that combine his modern perspective with a nod to the tradition and history of the Mosel.

Finnish-born and Dutch-raised, Philip caught the wine bug after doing harvest  at Clemens Busch in 2013. After apprenticeships at Henri Milan, Bernard Baudry, and Bertrand Jousset, he returned to the Mosel in 2017 and began working with Stein. After nearly five years together, with Philip starting his project in the Stein cellar, the pair amicably parted ways following the 2022 harvest.

This is a low-intervention project, aiming to create wines of authenticity. Only indigenous yeast is employed with no inoculations. Fermentation is not controlled so all wines ferment dry and have at least a partial malolactic fermentation. This takes place in used barrels (with a little experimentation using concrete eggs and acacia barrels). Some wines are lightly filtered and most see a small amount of S02 at bottling only.

Bottled unfiltered and a touch cloudy, as such they do not carry their place-name and are declassified to “Landwein der Mosel”. Lardot gets creative to tell you where the grapes are from and has invented a cast of characters for the labels. For example, “Der Graf,” the count, comes from Piesporter Grafenberg.