Moritz Kissinger
Rheinhessen, Germany
3 wines $28
This week we will be pouring three wines made by Moritz Kissinger, a winemaker from Rheinhessen Germany. All of the information below is copied directly from the people who import this wine to us, vomBoden; they have a deep and personal connection to these wines and no one will be able to do them more justice.
“While Moritz is a fourth-generation winemaker, he is only the second generation in his family to bottle his own wines; his father began before him in 1986. The family estate is about 14 hectares total; Moritz is farming around seven hectares for his own production.
Moritz Kissinger as a person has a warmth and an openness that, like his wines, feels both incredibly refreshing and also somehow familiar – and not in a chummy or cheesy way. He seems to be a sort of ever-smiling human combinator. I have rarely visited him (or have seen him) without a small entourage of friends from various nooks and crannies of the wine world. When I visit him we taste all of Moritz’s wines… and then normally a parade of wines from around the world – unicorns and trophies, oddballs and curiosities, everything and the kitchen sink. It’s like a vinous version of speed-scrolling through Instagram, sensory data points unfurling across the palate in rapid succession (though this is an analog, human experience, and so one feels none of the guilt after such a tasting).
Moritz seems to easily make good friends wherever he goes (reference above point regarding warmth and openness) and he goes a lot of places. He worked with Cedric Mousse and visits Champagne a lot; Burgundy is obviously a passion. Tomoko Kuriyama from Chanterêves posted about Kissinger and we had a little exchange. She wrote to me, “I love the soul and aesthetics of his whites… there’s a warmth and elegance, and on top of all that there’s an effortlessly defined style.”
Suffice it to say Mortiz has an incredible energy, a curiosity, a passion and sociability that maybe puts him at the center (or very close to it) of something that really feels like a movement of young growers in the Rheinhessen…
Moritz Kissinger (and Carsten Saalwächter up in the north of the Rheinhessen) represent for me the two most-realized growers of this “new Rheinhessen.” I’ve been tasting with both of them for years at this point, impressed by their freshman vintages, by the first wines they put into bottle… and now, only a few years later, slack-jawed and oftentimes honestly dumbfounded by how ****ing good these wines are.
I suppose what makes these wines so revelatory is the style, which, when you approach them through the lens of many Rheinhessen wines (most of which are grandiose yet crystalline dry Rieslings), they feel shocking, discombobulating, disorienting. Kissinger’s wines are more relaxed, wider. They use their textural qualities in an unapologetic way; they have an approachable honesty that isn’t rustic exactly, but it is maybe jarring – the degree of clarity, the forthrightness.
And then, with the second sip you approach the wines more as Chardonnay or Pinot Blanc (whether still or sparkling), or as Riesling, grown on limestone without thinking about the cultural baggage of the Rheinhessen, or of Germany at large, and they make perfect ****ing sense.”
These wines are absolutely what they should be.
The Line Up:
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“Winzersekt No. 3”
The “Winzersekt No. 3” is a one-third blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Blanc. Most of it is from the 2022 vintage, though a solera consisting largely of vintages 2020 and 2021 is also blended in.
Kissinger first came to collector’s attention when none other than Klaus Peter Keller raved about a bottle of his Chardonnay. Since then, his scarce releases have become something of a phenomenon – Chardonnays, Sauvignon Blancs, Weissburgunders, and, yes, Riesling all from the cold, limestone-riddled center of the Rheinhessen. Yet it could be that Moritz’s true love is sparkling wine. He has spent a lot of time in Champagne. Here we have Kissinger’s “Winzersekt No. 3,” a homage to a more direct expression of sparkling wine.
The bottling has fine layers of nervy citrus and stone fruit, a tensile backbone of minerals, and dusty herbs. As with great Champagne, the dizzying quality is both precision and an almost airy expansiveness. Having said this, we should point out that one of the most compelling qualities is that Kissinger’s sparkling is that it is not Champagne, it is something different. It is a great, honest German sparkling wine.
“0 Ohm” White 2023
The “0 Ohm” wines are what could be called the “estate wines,” a red and a white that, as their “0 Ohm” name implies, ripple with energy and bounce. An “Ohm,” if you’ve forgotten from your high school science class (as I had), is a measure of electrical resistance. In the case of both the red and the white, there is no resistance to this energy, this current. The 2023 white is a blend of Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay (as was the 2022) with a few days of maceration. The wine is saline, with waxy citrus fruit, lemon pith and herbs. This is not an “orange wine;” it is finer and has more definition and clarity than that suggests. To me, one would have to look perhaps to the Jura to contextualize this wine.
“0 Ohm” Red 2023
The 2023 “0 Ohm” red is 100% Pinot Noir (as was the 2022 before it), sourced from the cool, limestone-riddled vineyards in and around Kissinger’s hometown of Uelversheim in the central Rheinhessen – about a half-hour south and west from the famous Roter Hang, if you know it, and about a half-hour north and east from Keller’s village of Flörsheim-Dalsheim, if you know it.