Riesling Rocks

The wine trade is all about celebrating excellent winemakers but what about strong influential female winemakers?  Sybille Kuntz is just that. She is one of the many excellent winemakers/vineyard owners in the world, leading the charge in a predominantly male industry. In Germany however, she is still one of the very few female winemakers in the Mosel. Because of this, Sybille had to stick to her guns and forge her own path when she took over her father’s vineyard in the late 1980s. She had to be bold and more ambitious than all of her competitors. She has always been very much ‘hands on’ and very good vineyard management has been the key to her success. Modern vine training was implemented and canopy management was integral in extracting as much flavour from her grapes.

One of the first things she did was to start producing dry Rieslings, when the market was greedy for sweet wines and in 1990, she started using practising organic viticulture. In 2011, Sybille applied for certification. She then went on to use biodynamic methods (eventually receiving certification in 2016) and continued to make her interpretation of the best dry Mosel wines. Judging by Sybille’s accompishments now, we would say that her wines are not only modern, fresh and clean but we should also acknowledge the simple label designs on the bottles. This was a marked leap away from the stuffy Riesling labels that can quite rightly, sometimes bamboozle buyers, trying to negotiate the German quality control wine classification.