It’s Up to You: Drink Wine, Save the Mosel
If solutions are not found, the world’s greatest white wines, and the 2,000-year-old culture surrounding them, could vanish.

For many lovers of fine German wine, there is no substitute for the Riesling masterpieces from the Mosel. The inimitable combination of elegance and concentration, stoney minerality and wispy fruit, the texture of clouds around a core of icy steel, is to be found nowhere else on earth. Yet the challenges facing its vintners are starting to feel insurmountable.
Basic costs of running these estates, plus a severe labor shortage, are putting many of them in jeopardy of closing up shop. If solutions are not found, the world’s greatest white wines, and the 2,000-year-old culture surrounding them, could vanish.
The Mosel valley is one of Germany’s most northerly regions. It follows the meandering Mosel river from Trier in the west until it flows into the Rhein. For millennia, the short, harsh continental growing season meant this was the northern edge of viable viticulture.
Farmers had to utilize all available tools, geologic and otherwise, to attain adequate ripeness in their grapes. This meant planting on the steepest south-facing sites (to maximize sunlight); on dark, stoney soils (to absorb the heat of the day and blast it back at vines after dark); and along the river bank (to reflect back every ray of sunshine). Even then, three vintages a decade were failures.
Climate change has been a major boon for the region, guaranteeing good to great vintages all but once in a decade. Unfortunately, this comes only after the (self-inflicted) disaster that was Germany last century.
Before World War II German wines fetched the highest prices in the world, well above those of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne. Ever since, though, they’ve dropped out and with that came a lack of investment, abandonment of the best steep sites for easier-to-work, lower-quality flat areas, and a loss of reputation.
That cycle continued until the last two decades, when prices started to rise, but much of the wreckage may not be salvageable. Ancient sites are, at best, consolidated to a few larger land owners and, at worst, abandoned. Most of the valley now has pockets of scrubland over vineyards, melting into the hillsides.
Today the single greatest threat is not climate change, like in many of the world’s best regions (though that has ignited its own set of challenges), but labor. Young people moved away to cities in search of better-paying jobs and easier work.
Running a family wine estate anywhere is an all-consuming task. Forget work-life balance when survival means you are responsible for farming, winemaking, marketing, and sales: This is your life. In the Mosel this also includes the backbreaking labor of hiking up and down slopes of up to 65 degrees — almost every day, no matter the weather. This is farming at its most precarious, where you must often be strapped to a line hooked into a hillside above to keep from tumbling down. Mechanization is difficult, expensive, impossible, or deadly. Every year people die, often pinned under the tiny tractors utilized to make a few tasks just a bit less labor-intensive.
Who would do it? Well, not many people, and both the scarcity and cost of labor alone make these wines nearly impossible to comprehend. Under the best of circumstances, a quality-minded 20-hectare family-run estate with traditionally managed vineyards can net 160,000 bottles, costing $3 per bottle in labor.
The highest-rated Mosel Riesling on Vivino is sold to their importer for about $16/bottle (the next highest-rated bottle is about $2). All other costs — farming, winemaking, energy, packaging, sales & marketing, not to mention any profit for living on or reinvesting — have to be covered from $13/bottle.
Why would anyone even bother? Whether it be obsession, sadism, mental illness, a sense of duty or just love, the urge to face these challenges takes a special type of person.
Without government intervention or a market willing to bear ever steeper prices, we can expect to see fewer quality wines and the loss of one of the world’s greatest treasures. The good news is, you are that market. Drink wine. Save the Mosel.