Markus Molitor’s Three Star Pinot Noir programme from the Graacher Himmelreich vineyard represents one of the most disciplined and intellectually serious attempts to produce Grand Cru-quality red wine from the Mosel Valley’s finest slate terraces. Molitor, whose 120-hectare estate is the largest privately-held family winery in the Middle Mosel, built his reputation on Rieslings of extraordinary precision and longevity across the full Prädikat range; his parallel Pinot Noir programme, begun in earnest over the past decade, applies the same fastidious selection and ageing philosophy to a variety whose potential in the warming Mosel has been significantly underestimated. The Graacher Himmelreich is one of the valley’s most historically revered sites, a steeply terraced, south-facing vineyard above the village of Graach whose deep Devon slate soils produce wines of distinctive mineral intensity.

The 2017 Mosel vintage was hot and generous, delivering wines of excellent concentration but less of the steely tension that characterises the finest cool-year Mosel Rieslings. For Pinot Noir, however, 2017 provided the warmth needed for full phenolic ripeness on the slate-dominated Himmelreich terraces, producing a red wine of greater fruit generosity and texture than a cooler vintage would typically allow. The Three Star designation represents Molitor’s most carefully selected Pinot Noir material, aged for an extended period in used French barriques before bottling in the Trocken style that emphasises the wine’s dry, site-driven character without any residual sweetness.

Mosel Pinot Noir of this quality and ambition occupies a genuinely unusual position in the market: neither a conventional German red nor a Burgundy imitation, but a wine that borrows the structural elegance of the former and the terroir precision of the latter while remaining distinctively Moselian in its mineral identity. For collectors who follow Molitor’s Rieslings and wish to explore the full range of the estate’s ambition across varieties and styles, the Himmelreich Three Star Pinot Noir is the most serious and fully realised expression of this dimension of the estate’s work.

Pale ruby with a fragrant and mineral nose of red cherry, raspberry, dried rose, wet slate and a light oak spice. Light to medium-bodied with very fine tannins, high natural acidity from the Mosel slate terroir and a long, dry, mineral finish of Burgundian elegance and great purity. Drink now through 2031.