Doris 2023 (Litre Bottle) - Katla Wines

Originally from the suburbs of Mönchengladbach in the industrial Rhineland, it took leaving Germany for Jas to find her way into wine. Following her nose and picking her mentors well, Jas is now settled in Wöllstein in Rheinhessen, where she runs her micro-négoce, as well as keeping just under a hectare of vines herself. Working and studying wine at restaurants around Europe, Jas' swansong in service came at Dill in Reykjavík, the first restaurant in Iceland to win a Michelin star, where she worked as a sommelier. What followed was a series of stages with producers whose wines she loved, most notably a now-retired doyen of southern Ardèche wine, Gilles Azzoni, who incidentally introduced me to Jas' wines while I myself was staging at Gilles' cellar in les Salelles. It was Gilles who impressed on Jas the possibility of producing wines without a family estate or owning vines (Gilles, himself a Parisian, did it in 1980). Inspired and encouraged, Jas took what savings she had to rent a corner of a cellar in the Mosel, and source fruit from the disparate band of growers behind the region's burgeoning viticultural enlightenment.
Her first vintage was 2019, with 2,500 litres produced. It was a case of the right place at the right time for Jas. As a micro-négoce, she collaborates with growers at the epicentre of contemporary German winemaking from her base in Rheinhessen, working with varieties well-adapted to the pressures of the modern vineyard and a shifting climate. Sourcing grapes from Nahe, Pfalz, Rheinhessen and beyond, Jas applies the same subversive spirit in making her blends, deliberate in her crossing of borders, varieties, and colours, critiquing the hegemony of single-sites or noble varieties.

With fruit from Rheinhessen and Nahe, this is classified Deutscher Wein. The Dornfelder is from Niklas Rückrich in Eckelsheim, growing on limestone and loess at heart of Rheinhessen. Germany's largest region by both area and volume, it's long been associated with bulk production. These days Niklas and his contemporaries have elevated the region's status, with the digestibility and substance of their wines sought after by sommeliers and cavistes from Copenhagen to Seoul. Dornfelder is a German crossing developed in the 1950s, giving deep-coloured wines with firm tannins. Here, the direct-pressed juice gives us something lighter and fruit-driven, capturing the variety's fruitiness, while leaving the weight behind. The Riesling comes from Christine Pieroth of Piri Naturel in Nahe, a valley nestled between Rheinhessen and the Mosel. Its remarkable geological diversity, with volcanic, slate, sandstone and clay soils enmeshed and overlapping, gives Riesling a racy precision, bringing lift and structure to this blend.

Grapes: Dornfelder, Riesling

Region: Rheinhessen, Germany

ABV: 15%