Weingut Clemens Busch

The Free Bacchus Story

The blue Devon slate terraces of the Terrassenmosel cannot be worked by machine. Every operation requires a person standing on a gradient that would be treated as a climb anywhere other than a vineyard, and there is no version of this farming that is not physically punishing.

Clemens Busch has done it under certified organic and Respekt-Biodyn biodynamic standards since 1984 — well before the modern organic wine movement had language for celebrating it, and at a point when the extra labour bought no commercial advantage at all.

He stopped spraying herbicide in 1976, aged nineteen, after asking himself why he could not simply live with the weeds. The oldest vines root eight metres down, which they only manage because the ground has not been sprayed since.

The holdings concentrate on the Marienburg, a single south-facing hillside in Pünderich whose varying exposures, slate types and altitudes let Busch produce a series of site-specific Rieslings that function as a geological survey of one mountain. The Fahrlay, Rothenpfad and Felsterrasse bottlings are among the most precise terroir documents in German wine, and have drawn 98 points from both Wine Advocate and James Suckling.

That places the estate at the top of the Mosel's quality hierarchy alongside houses with far greater name recognition and considerably shorter farming records. The wines are not easy to find outside Germany, which means people who locate them tend not to let go.