News & Events

Two turns north of the famed Bernkasteler Doctor vineyard, Germany’s winding Mosel River passes the village of Kröv, where Jan Matthias Klein runs his family’s centuries-old Staffelter Hof winery. Here, he’s been producing the sort of riesling that we expect from the Mosel: vivid, exacting and water-clear, in the manner that his father and grandfather did. But more recently, in the same cellar, he’s embarked on a side project called Pandamonium (named for a short-lived ’80s cartoon featuring three pandas with superpowers). The project currently encompasses an entirely distinct set of natural wines, including an unsulfured, unfiltered, just slightly hazy riesling called Papa Panda’s Rising. This is, at least in part, what the Mosel’s relatively new go at natural wine looks like.

2011 to 2020 was the warmest decade on record for planet Earth, according to United Nations. The global wine industry, which is largely the product of the growing environment of each vineyard within unique production regions, is reporting that changes in the climate are impacting traditional methods and expectations. This goes beyond rising temperatures. “Because the Earth is a system, where everything is connected, changes in one area can influence changes in all others,” (via United Nations).