Riesling Marienburg Grosse Lage "Raffes" 2020

A Riesling with pressure and depth. Made in an off-dry style, with a fruit sweetness kept in shape by salinity and spicy tannin.

The Marienburg above Pünderich on the Mosel is a steep slate slope, and it is anything but uniform: red, grey and blue slate lie side by side and produce fundamentally different wines. Clemens Busch makes this legible through coloured capsules. Of the estate's 20 hectares of steep vineyards, 11 lie within the Marienburg. The oldest vines root up to eight metres deep into the rock, possible only because the soil has been farmed without herbicides since 1976.

Pure Riesling, 12.5% vol., off-dry. In the cellar, 80 percent of the wines ferment spontaneously in centuries-old 1000-litre oak casks, without cultured yeasts, without enzymes, without fining. Some fermentations stretch out over more than a year. The long ageing on fine lees adds further complexity.

Sparkling golden yellow in the glass. The nose is immediately gripping: Boskoop apple, vineyard peach and apricot, with lemon zest, a meadow full of flowers and herbs, honey and delicate malty notes. On the palate, pure juiciness, saline and mineral, pleasantly challenging, with a long finish that points to its ageing potential.

Carrot soup with ginger and fresh cheese dumplings, grilled mackerel fillets with corn and cucumber, or veal fillet with candied orange slices, pomegranate seeds and toasted pine nuts.

Clemens Busch runs the estate in Pünderich in its seventh generation. At 19, in 1976, he stopped using herbicides, and the estate has worked biodynamically since 1986. In 2023 the winery received the Robert Parker Green Emblem.