Henrik Möbitz
This producer's website is www.moebitz.com jht
Some history of the estate and some of the vineyard geology, shared by a friend in the industry:
Henrik, who is from Bielefeld, in Westphalia, studied in southwestern Germany’s Baden at the University of Freiburg and has a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry and a master’s in Philosophy. He lives with his wife in Freiburg and commutes during the week to Basel, where he’s an investigator in preclinical research. Wine is his second vocation. In 1997, he began as an autodidact and often spends his evenings, weekends, and off-days in the vineyards and cellar.
He now just rents a mere 0.6 hectares divided among four sites: Kapelle, Koepfle, Kanzel, and Steinberg. The three “K’s,” as he likes to call the first three, are all located in Alte Oelberg in Ehrenstetten, just southwest of Freiburg:
Kapelle. The steep south-facing part with old terraces. The soil is a mix of marl and sandstone with almost no iron oxide.
Koepfle. The crest above Kapelle and the hillside path, south facing. Deep topsoil with lots of iron oxide mixed in with limestone.
Kanzel. A tiny vineyard area situated above a rocky cliff and surrounded by wind-shielding woods; southeast facing. A limestone soil with less iron oxide than in Steinberg or Koepfle.
Alte Oelberg, or the old Ehrenstetter Oelberg, is the former name of this small hillside. For hundreds of years it’s been left untouched, so no consolidation or restructuring of the hillside vineyards, called Flurbereinigung, took place here. It’s the last geological rise when moving south along the range of a small massif, known as the Schönbergkette, between the Rhine plain to the west (towards nearby Alsace) and the foot of the Black Forest to the east.
As in the Mosel region, the 1971 German Wine Law significantly reduced the number of single vineyards in Baden by grouping various old sites under one name, usually a better-known vineyard. Henrik wrote that the 1971 Wine Law designated all the semi-decent vineyards in the commune of Ehrenstetten under an expanded Oelberg (ten times larger than the original site!) and the vines planted in what were formerly potato fields or on less-privileged north-facing slopes received the well-sounding name of Rosenberg.
Steinberg (Bollschweiler Steinberg) is a hillside vineyard located in the village of Bollschweil, about one kilometer east of Ehrenstetten. It’s even more influenced by the cool Hexental (“witches valley”), in between the Schönbergkette and the Black Forest, as the grapes tend to ripen later than in Alte Oelberg. The higher iron content also gives the wines a somewhat harder tannin structure. Only on the southeast hillsides of Oelberg and Steinberg are layers of limestone strata; on the west sides are the more typical clayey soils. When I asked Henrik to describe his various sites, he says, “Kanzel is aristocratic, Kapelle a little bit sauvage [wild], whereas Koepfle is plush with appealing ripe green tones, and Steinberg is almost Riesling-like.”
Henrik doesn’t seek surmaturité, or overripeness. He prefers to pick a little earlier to ensure good acidity from ripe healthy grapes. In the past, he was categorically against chaptalization, even if this resulted in very low alcohol levels à la the older wines from Hubert de Montille in Volnay. “With just a tad higher alcohol from a symbolic chaptalization (0.5 to 0.7 percent), I find that my wines hit their sweet spot showing more body, yet without losing any of their ability to go down well—the 2008s are still pretty low in alcohol anyway (11.7 to 12.2 percent),” he says. Henrik avoids over-extraction, too, instead preferring delicacy, expression, and precision in his Pinot Noirs.
Since 2005, he acquired a deep, cool cellar that is located at the foot of Alte Oelberg in a former mill. “I like to think that the drinkability of my wines is due to the cellar used to be the riverbed of a former mill,” Henrik says with a bit of tongue-and-cheek esotericism (“water flow=drinkability…”). All work is done by gravity—in other words, no pumping. He ferments exclusively with ambient yeasts in stainless-steel tanks and ages his wines in custom-made wooden barrels from a local cooper. The oak is sourced from Denzlingen, in the Black Forest, and dried naturally outdoors for three years. He says, “buying local barrels ensures that I get slow-grown, properly aged wood, which is not a given these days—I also like the aromatics which are more floral-fruity than oaky and integrate very well.” His Pinot Noirs are neither fined nor filtered.
Besides Pinot Noir, Henrik makes some very good Gewürtztraminer and Weißburgunder (Pinot Blanc). His production needs to be shown to a wider audience even if it doesn’t make sense to go through all the red tape to have just a few cases imported to the States. Then again, the hope is that someone selects these type of wines.