NatCool Fio Riesling

Riesling

Mosel, Germany

The name Fio means ‘thread’ in Portuguese. The estate is a joint venture connecting two families: the Kettern family, who have been making wine in the Mosel for several hundred years, and the Niepoort family, led by famed Portuguese winemaker, Dirk Niepoort. Dirk is known for his different collaborations and works with winemakers across the globe. In addition to his travels in Spain, France, and Italy, he had traveled to the Mosel in his youth and befriended the late Wilhelm Haag, who passed away earlier this year. Wilhelm was an iconoclast and taught Dirk that “great wine didn’t have to be powerful and rich to be wonderful.”

In the cellar, the wines are naturally fermented in very old Mosel fuder barrels and without sulfur. The ferments can take a long time to complete, but here, nothing is rushed. Most of the wines in the range are fermented completely dry and spend between one and three years in barrel, on the full lees before being bottled, unfined and unfiltered. SO2 is used at bottling and in low levels.