Vom Boden

Industry only, sorry about that. A few random notes:

It’s probably not a good idea to try and taste all 100 wines.

Please taste and *BUY* because that’s how we keep these small growers growing!

If you are in the industry and just want to learn, you are welcome! This is a huge part of our mission and passion.

Maybe find the Keller first and taste that as it’ll get drained first? It won’t be on our tasting sheets and the bottles will change locations every 10 minutes just to keep it exciting.

Snacks by our friends - thank you Jin! 😘

RSVP [email protected]

Everything is basically low-abv! Unfortunately this trait comes from nature and isn’t meant to fill “dynamic growth category!”

Think of Württemberg as Cornas but only 400 miles further north?

Say hi to friends but also ignore some people so you can actually taste.

RSVP [email protected]

Ask Collin about Beethoven’s 9th.

Email us with any questions - can’t wait to see you!

The first 2023ers have arrived marking a turn of the calendar page in our little part of the wine world.

Something about seeing the new vintage in hand feels transporting every spring. Time travel to the future (i mean holy hell, it’s 2024!?) but also back to the challenges and successes of the growing year before-The life cycle of the vines and the humans who guide and shape the process from shoot to bottle.

The unlikelihood of it all feels particularly relevant with the reports of frost affecting many of our growers and friends, limiting the crop possible at the very start of the 2024 vintage. These new wines are not a given, it is a gift of fruit from nature and the hard work of the growers.

So while we know these wines intimately, WeiKu and Lauer have been with us since the beginning of vom Boden, excuse us while we take the next few weeks to learn anew and acquaint ourselves with our own version of the new year.

“Turn around, turn around, turn around
And you may come full circle
And be new here again”
‘I’m New Here’ Gil Scott-Herron

I’m really losing faith and interest in IG - it feels like a dead space these days, to me at least.

On the other hand: pictures are cool! Here’s 10 from a recent trip to Germany with

Erik Longabardi and Benford Lepley are doing something just utterly soulful and inspiring out of Erik’s tiny garage in Roslyn and it registers, quite obviously, if you’re paying any attention at all – even if you don’t particularly care about Long Island, or natural wine, or preserving old apple trees inconveniently planted near strip malls.

It’s a deeply felt project, overseen with intelligence, purpose, and more than a little bit of passion. Both of these guys have other, full-time jobs. So far as I can tell they spend nearly all their free time working on this project, gathering people to help them work on this, feeding and supporting the people that help them with this. At the end of the year, while I hope they make a little bit of money, my guess is the hourly wages of all this would probably be calculated in cents.

In other words, through nearly any rational or economic prism, none of this makes any sense at all.

Which is of course part of what makes this project – Floral Terranes – so unique, so special. This is what we feel when we are near these wines, even if we can’t articulate it exactly… though I think the best word to articulate this feeling is maybe easy: “love.”

We hope you love these wines; we hope you’ll go out and support the great restaurants and retailers that are supporting Erik and Benford. I say it a lot, but it’s true: It is a very short line between your support and the growers themselves. When you buy a bottle, you keep Erik and Benford doing what they are doing, which in turn keeps the agricultural landscape of Long Island preserved.

So, without further ado, find the list of supporters, from around the country in out stories or in your email. Please go out there and support them.

The wines of Enderle & Moll were nothing short of a revelation when I first tasted them.

It was the first estate I tasted that so clearly offered the counter-narrative to what most red wine was at that moment—dense color, extraction, voluminous textures and ripeness above all (“Spätburgunder Auslese Trocken” if you will).

Instead Enderle & Moll’s Pinots were alarmingly light in color unquestionably light, often times angular and structured, focused on the quality of the site and didn’t seem to care at all about the potential alcohol.

In a world that valued fruit, Enderle & Moll delivered soil tones and wines with a perfect sense of balance. They are ruthlessly soil driven, they can be wild. Enderle & Moll has a style that will not appeal to all, but it will appeal to many.

And to some, the wines will be a revelation.

Enderle & Moll seems to have found this place, this style, very early on. And it’s worth remembering that they did so at a time when it was not obvious nor easy to focus on wines of soil and delicacy. For this Enderle & Moll deserves a rather hallowed place in the story of German Pinot Noir.

The 2022 Grand Crus have just arrived. Link in bio for the full report. Email us [email protected] for help tracking some down!

I don’t usually promote interviews too much; I hate the sound of my own voice and it always feels too self-promotional and slightly icky.

But this seems to me like an important interview, at least in so far as we talk about the renaissance in German wine, the new German landscape, etc.

Find the interview on Spotify; skip the Daily for a day and listen to this?

Link in profile.

The arrival of the 2022er wines inspired me to publish a rant on the Newsfeed - link in profile.

It’s about these wines, and how great they are, yadda yadda, but more importantly it’s about our current wine world, and its myopic obsession with Instagram-darling wines and our failure to recognize beauty and singularity that isn’t famous or allocated or expensive…

And all this led me into another diatribe of just how singular and crazy the Moselle is, truly a ballast for our hyper-cool world. The Moselle is just the Moselle is just the Moselle.

Long live the Moselle.

Oh yeah - also buy these damn wines holy hell are they good. Ever had a wine with 15 grams RS that was dry? (See slide 2) 🤯

Back in 2018 (!) it wasn’t wildly evident to either or myself how people might respond to his very specific, garage-winery in Long Island. For starters, he was largely sourcing fruit from forgotten trees near strip malls, overgrown monasteries and other relics of Long Island’s more bucolic history. Second, well, the wines were going to be presented by a tiny, still fairly unknown company focusing on German wines. Not exactly the easiest scenario to explain?

Yet now, five years later - now with the apple Yoda - represents one of our most-awaited annual releases. I’d be exaggerating if I said it’s any sort of “big event,” yet that’s kind of the point.

If not all that many people care… those who do care, care profoundly.

And that is what makes this all so special - the tiny scale, the human love. This is more an embrace, a heartfelt kiss on the cheek, than a commercial enterprise.

We cherish this…

The 2022 are now available - just beginning to get out there in the wild.

Link in bio for the full report. Email us [email protected] with any questions!

Don’t follow the vintage.

Follow the *grower* as you would follow a friend.

And dear friend, the 2022 Grand Crus - and a Premier Cru 1G - from have arrived. They are relatively availability and relatively inexpensive, for what they are.

The more complex truth is that many a ho-hum wine is lifted up by the reputation of its vintage. Simultaneously, many truly epic wines are lost in the shadow of a vintage, and so it is with 2022… a vintage that is effortlessly refreshing, as light and energetic as vintages from decades past… whose greatest curse was only to come after 2021.

I don’t think it’s outlandish to suggest the Nahe might represent one of the pinnacles of this joyous, delicate and ephemeral vintage, even if I can’t quote some specific statistic to explain this. There is no easy explanation as to why this might be the case.

But you can taste it.

The 2022ers from are uncannily delicate - their lightness suggests a provocative reassessment of what a GG is, or should be. I have the strange sense that this category will develop, slowly, naturally, toward lighter wines. If the most dramatic change of the GGs from 2010 to 2020 was the lowering of residual sugar, I think we will see a similar trend in alcohol from 2020-2030. A 2030 GG with 11% alcohol? My guess is yes. My beloved “Kabinett Trocken,” now bottled as Grand Cru, even though it already is.

If the best wines of 2022 suggest this trend with their nimbleness, keep in mind these are not dainty wines. They have structure, depth, concentration - they will develop effortlessly for a decade if not more.

In short, damn these are good wines.

Every year I taste Florian Lauer’s wines and it feels like the first time. Somehow, throughout the year I forget just how singular these wines are - not inherently better or worse than many other estates, but just so different. There is no other winery in Germany that makes wines quite like - intensity, texture, lightness.

I can’t explain the why or how, but Lauer’s 22 collection is one of my all-time favorites. They are just now arriving around the U.S. - reach out [email protected] if you need help finding them. 🙏

Right before the 10th anni party, surprised me with a beautiful gift - a 48 x 48” (?) ink on paper drawing / map by of the winemaking regions of Germany, from Saale-Unstrut down to Württemberg with nearly all of the estates we work with illustrated. While Jin had the arduous task of hauling a bazooka-sized poster carton across the Atlantic, it was a collaborative gift and I’m so thankful 🥲- THANK YOU 🙏 ❤️

On the flight back after spending two weeks tasting the young 2022ers, this question popped into my head: “Can joy be bottled?” Vintage 2022 seems to be some sort of philosophical investigation into this very question.

It’s a curious situation - truly ethereal wines from a hot vintage (we explain the riddle in the report), yet the wines are so present, so expansive and direct.

I’m very interested how we will respond to this vintage. Do we pass because we gorged on 2021ers, or because I haven’t yet written the word “great” to describe the vintage?

There is so much to love about 2022 - its presence and finesse… Yes, there will be EPIC wines from the vintage (seek out old vines and top producers), yet the soul of this vintage feels different. As canonical and defining as 2021 was, 2022 is just joy.

Not to bury the lede, but that is a kind of greatness too, I think.

Ten years ago to THIS VERY DAY!!! - I left my good solid job and started What a fu***ng amazing journey and I wake up still, everyday, feeling like the luckiest person on earth. Our tiny team is, each and every person, brilliant and passionate and so filled with integrity and honesty - work feels like just hanging out with friends, because this is what it mostly is. And the growers, my heroes… the honor of a lifetime. Anyone wanna party in July in the Mosel?!!!! 🙏 ❤️

So while we are sold out of all our rosés (at least in theory), they are arriving and our lovely friends in retail and restaurants around this fine country will have the electric Gatorade juice that only the cool north can shape - .beurer (sorry no picture bc I drank the damn bottle too quickly - true story) .wein (sorry no picture because it JUST inbounded) have all arrived! Stein and Shelter should arrive any moment… then please let your summer begin and THANK YOU!

If you think you know what to expect from us, maybe you should reconsider this.

Or, maybe you should know that if something is soulful and honest and great, if we can, we will try and support. Also, as it happens, we love beer and it is our collective opinion that Luc LaFontaine is an absolute master of this craft, producing what we believe are the some of the greatest beers in North America. We especially fell for his Lagers and Pilsners that are effortlessly drinkable - light yet fiercely aromatic and sharp from fresh hops with just the perfect delicate touch mid-palate from malt.

This is beer as something so perfectly essential - nothing more than is needed without any of the gimmicks of modern beer-craft. Beer as it used to be? 

As chance would have it, a few months later Bohemia's Pilsner Urquell, one of the iconic houses of Pilsner, would offer for the first time in its history two of their massive lagering casks to another brewery. Luc was the fortunate recipient. With these casks, Luc would begin brewing a beer in Toronto in loving homage to this old-style Urquell.

And thus we come to today's offer: Sklepník, a cask-conditioned "old Plzeň"-style Pilsner - an ode to a rare style of Urquell that could only be tasted in their home cellars... until now. 

Today we are offering, on pre-order only for shipping in May, a mixed 12-pack of Skelpník and their other nod to Czech Brewing Tradition, their calling-card Lager Světlý Ležák 12º for $72. We understand this is not a small sum of money for cans of beer. On the other hand, we also believe for the quality of this beer, the depth of the craft and the process, this is a steal.

Sorry, sometimes life is complicated.

How will all this work? It's easy: Just write to [email protected] and include how many 12-pack cases you would like and your address. Unfortunately at this time, our retail partner for this offer cannot ship to the following states: AL, AK, HI, ME, MS, MT, SD, UT, VT, ND, WY.

Obviously it’s impossible to approach these wines without more than a bit of emotion; 2021 was Daniel’s last harvest. In many ways, these new arrivals - the 2021 village-level Wolfer dry and the Grand Cru Goldgrube dry - are monuments to him, to his life and legacy.

On the other hand, in many ways they are also a testament of things to come, they are a testament of the strength of the estate now in the hands of Moritz Hoffmann, Daniel’s partner at the estate for the last two years.

Writing about all of this openly and honestly is a tricky balance; I neither want to offend Daniel’s legacy nor to be seen as propping up the new guy, but the truth is Moritz did nearly all the cellar work from 2019 on… Daniel was just very sick and wanted to be in the vineyards, as one can imagine. If Moritz’s skills with the Prädikat wines was to keep them at the elite level they were at (no small feat), with the dry wines I do think he has raised the bar. Daniel agreed to many changes Moritz wanted to make to these wines including picking earlier and doing less skin contact.

The results are astounding. The wines are as dense and compact as ever, yet to me they are sharper, clearer and more energetic than ever. Especially in the 2021 these wines are monuments and are best enjoyed after opening for 24-48 hours plus - or cellar them as long as you can.

These are silly rare, so if you want them, please email us [email protected] and we will point you in the right direction. If you are in the business reach out ASAP. 🙏