Rome planted the Mosel from Trier, its northern capital, and the monasteries kept the terraced slate slopes through the Middle Ages. By the late nineteenth century the great Rieslings of Bernkastel and Piesport fetched prices above the first growths of the Médoc on the wine lists of the world.
The wine remains unlike any other: eight percent alcohol, sweetness strung on wire-taut acidity, apple and slate resolving into honey over decades. The Prädikat ladder — Kabinett to Trockenbeerenauslese — grades the ripeness of each picking, and the blue-grey Devonian slate underfoot feeds the vine and warms it, hoarding sun on slopes too steep for machines.