Back on the road again at 8.30am, heading south for the Mosel. A two hour drive, including a bit of traffic congestion, but the final 20 minutes off the autobahn took us through rolling wooded hills, and finally into the valley itself. A patchwork of vineyards descended from the trees at the top of the hills right down to the river, with famous vineyard names occasionally appearing among the vines.
We arrived in the village of Piesport to visit Lothar Kettern. Philipp Kettern, Tim had explained on the bus ride, is an innovative young wine maker doing some very interesting things with his family’s estate. He was doing some things in the vineyards that morning (spraying is very much the order of the day, following such wet weather), so he had handed over to a young chap called Daniel to take us around.
Daniel’s bohemian appearance belied his aristocratic wine ancestry – he is a scion of Niepoort, a famous Portuguese winery, that has entered into a partnership with Kettern. Daniel, who is half Swiss and must speak at least four languages, has completed his wine training in Switzerland and is currently working at Kettern, his brother Marco is a couple of years behind him on this apprenticeship.
Daniel, with a rather fruity turn of phrase, gave us a fabulous insight into what it is really like working with vines. We spent a good half an hour in the vineyard; looking at some early leaf pruning work (exposing the young grapes to sun so they don’t get ‘sunburnt’ as they grow, and allowing more air to pass through the leaves and grapes to reduce mildew inducing moisture); then walking down to the river and looking across the the unbelievably steep vineyards which require caterpillar machinery attached to hoists to work the vines.
Then to the ‘garage-ist’ winery, where the emphasis was on practicality rather than prettiness. With some more fruity language, Daniel explained that the vintage he had already done here had brought a great deal of real world insight to his academic learning. For example, as we 
could see in the cellar (where last year’s harvest was still in old barriques and foudres) carbon dioxide bubbling up from one of the barrels – fermentation is all from natural yeasts, and as dry the wines sit on their lees over many months, a bit more fermentation occasionally starts up) – all perfectly natural, and to be celebrated not treated as an emergency.
We tasted on the terrace with a backdrop of the vineyards, and a beautifully simple lunch prepared by Philip’s mother.
We started with the Kettern Riesling Trocken, its label reflecting Philipp’s local nickname of “the wine pirate”. This was made from the first of three passes they make to harvest the grapes, each time picking the bunches that are ripest (or as Daniel described it closest to rotting). It was bone dry, very light but had lovely minerality. Its Pirate sibling the Feinherb had 12g of residual sugar and was richer on the nose with a super mouthfeel.
We then seemed to go off-piste, and found ourselves exploring a couple of wines from barrel – the Ratzelhaft (a Riesling/Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc) blend 
and the Fio, a 2013 unfiltered Riesling that had undergone malolactic fermentation (very minerally with hints of burnt caramel). Further still off piste and we were drinking a Portuguese wine from the Douro (Niepoort’s Vertente, with 15 different grape varieties grown on similar schist soil to that of the Mosel). Back to stuff coming out of bottles with labels on them, and we enjoyed a 2014 Riesling Trocken from the final picking which was rich and savoury, a 2015 Kabinet with 35g of residual sugar and finally a Piesporter Goldtropfken Spälese from 2013 – fabulously fruity, gloriously sweet but with great minerality and that lovely petrol character that I adore.
Oh yes, and just before the final Riesling we had two Niepoort ports, both bottled in 2015, one a 2011 Late Bottles Vintage, the other a 2005 Tawny Colheita. What a privilege (the tawny won hands down, though it wasn’t actually a competition).
Philipp joined us for a quick bite of lunch but was clearly happy to let Daniel (and increasingly Marco) doing the ‘schmoozing’, and we went away feeling we had been incredibly lucky to meet a mix of generations of some really fabulous winemaking families.