Travelling up the Mosel from Koblenz, you reach a landscape near Winningen that looks more like Liguria than Rhineland-Palatinate: wall upon wall, terrace upon terrace, with slate and vines in between. This lower stretch of the river has come to be known as the Terrassenmosel, the terraced Mosel. The name was coined – according to the wein.plus wine guide, at least – by Reinhard Löwenstein. A graduate agricultural engineer, he founded the Heymann-Löwenstein estate in 1980 together with his wife Cornelia Heymann-Löwenstein. The family itself, by its own account, has been growing wine in Winningen since 1520. What was new in 1980, then, was not the winegrowing but the attitude.
A spectre called terroir
Löwenstein was never a winegrower who quietly disappears into his cellar. Wein.plus writes that he is often described as the rebel of the Mosel, and his writings explain why. In 2003 he published an essay in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) that opens with a sentence one can only write with a certain relish for provocation: „Ein Gespenst geht um in der Weinwelt. Sein Name ist Terroir.“ (our translation: “A spectre is haunting the world of wine. Its name is terroir.”) The thrust was clear. In Germany, he argued, wine quality had for a good hundred years been defined by Oechsle – that is, by the sugar content of the grapes. Löwenstein countered that origin, rock and work shape a wine more than a reading taken at harvest.
Fifteen years later he returned to the theme in the 2018 VDP book under the title „Wer hat Angst vor Terroir?“ (our translation: “Who’s afraid of terroir?”). The VDP is the Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter, Germany’s association of top estates. Romanticism is not his line: vineyards and wines, he writes, are children of civilisation and belong to agriculture, not to some idealised nature. He sees terroir wines as a cultural alternative to industrial reproducibility. You need not endorse every one of these statements to notice that German vineyard classification has since moved in a similar direction.
One hill, three characters
Löwenstein’s thinking is at its clearest in the Winninger Uhlen. The 1971 wine law had, here as in many places, gathered different parts of a slope under a single site name. The estate writes that in the Uhlen „drei so extrem unterschiedliche Charaktere mit einem Namen zusammengefasst“ (our translation: “three such extremely different characters were combined under one name”) that they needed to be distinguished by sub-appellations. After years of work, the three sections were recognised in 2018 as protected designations of origin in their own right (geschützte Ursprungsbezeichnung, gU); for Uhlen Blaufüßer Lay this is documented in Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/1964 of 6 December 2018. The trade journal Weinwirtschaft reported the new designations in October 2018. Six Winningen estates were involved: besides Heymann-Löwenstein, Freiherr von Heddesdorff, Fries, Knebel, Rüdiger Kröber and Richard Richter. Weinwirtschaft calls Löwenstein a co-initiator; Mosel Fine Wines describes him as the driving force behind the application. According to Weinwirtschaft, he saw in it „die erste wirklich konsequente »Appellation contrôlée« auf deutschem Boden verwirklicht“ (our translation: “the first truly consistent ‘appellation contrôlée’ realised on German soil”). He did not invent the names, though: „Unter der Blaufüßer Lay“, for instance, is an old cadastral name, according to the estate.
The boundaries follow the geology and were drawn by the state geological survey. The estate gives the areas as follows: Blaufüßer Lay 1.58 hectares, Laubach 6.94 hectares, Roth Lay 8.27 hectares. The rules are strict. Only Riesling is permitted, with at least 7,000 vines per hectare and a maximum yield of 70 hectolitres per hectare of cadastral area – which, the estate says, works out at around 50 hectolitres per hectare in practice because of the gradient – and no more recent oenological techniques. Prädikat levels such as Kabinett (the lightest, traditionally delicate and often with some residual sweetness) or Spätlese (“late harvest”, the next level up) are not provided for; the wines are dry to halbtrocken (medium-dry), or edelsüß – nobly sweet.
What lies behind this geologically? The Blaufüßer Lay sits on blue-grey, clay-rich Devonian slate. In the Laubach the slate is sandy and coloured grey by a lime content of up to ten per cent, which is unusual for the Mosel. In the Roth Lay the rock changes from grey to various shades of red as you climb, with iron and manganese drawing patterns on the stone. According to the estate, the name Uhlen goes back to the Middle High German word for owl, while Lay is the old word for slate. For “Blaufüßer” the estate offers two explanations: the dialect expression “Bloos-Lay” for the blue-grey colour of the rock, or ospreys said to have lived here until the late 19th century. It leaves open which is right, and so do we.
Heymann-Löwenstein farms parcels in all three sections – by its own figures 0.7 hectares in the Blaufüßer Lay, 2.5 hectares in the Laubach and 1.6 hectares in the Roth Lay. The slopes have gradients of 100 to 170 per cent; the vines average more than 50 years of age, and in the Blaufüßer Lay and Roth Lay over 60, many of them ungrafted. Fermentation takes place with wild yeasts in large wooden casks, and the wines spend at least 18 months on their lees.
Doing the sums on walls
In total the estate farms a little over 13 hectares (VDP figure), almost exclusively Riesling, in Winningen and Hatzenport. Besides the three Uhlen sections, Röttgen, Kirchberg and Stolzenberg are also classified as VDP.Große Lage, the association’s top site tier and its equivalent of Grand Cru. The estate itself sets out how costly such slopes are. It maintains, by its own account, 13 kilometres of vineyard walls. Instead of 250 to 600 hours in mechanised sites, working by hand takes „an die 2000 Stunden“ (our translation: “close to 2,000 hours”) to farm one hectare sustainably. Establishing a new hectare of terraced vineyard would, on a cautious estimate, cost around €1.5 million. Of just over 100,000 hectares of German vineyard, only about 750 hectares are still terraced.
Then there is a historical comparison worth quoting next time you are at your wine merchant’s: at the end of the 19th century, the estate says, a bottle from the Uhlen cost as much as Château Margaux. Today the ratio is one to twenty.
The walls, incidentally, support more than Riesling. The Mosel Apollo butterfly, one of Germany’s most endangered butterfly species, even carries Winningen in its subspecies name, “vinningensis”. Its caterpillars feed on white stonecrop, which grows on dry-stone walls. According to the estate, the population in the Uhlen grew strongly from the 1970s onwards, but lately it has been seeing fewer butterflies year after year. It has started planting knapweed and is planning a larger rescue effort with Hochschule Geisenheim.
The next generation, not as expected
For a long time it looked like a classic family succession. Daughter Sarah Löwenstein, the 14th generation, gave the business „entscheidende Impulse“ (our translation: “decisive impetus”) over the past ten years, the estate writes; according to wein.plus, she was most recently in charge of the business. Then, in November 2025, came the news that the family was stepping down. According to Vinum, the new owner since 2026 has been Jochen Heigoldt, founder of the wine merchant Vioneers near Stuttgart, together with two further partners – two business families who, according to Weinwirtschaft, wish to remain in the background. Since 1 January 2026 the managing director has been Thomas Dörr, who previously spent twelve years at the Pfalz estate Dr. Bürklin-Wolf, most recently as head of sales. Reinhard Löwenstein stays on in an advisory role, and the team remains unchanged. What role Sarah Löwenstein plays after the sale is not clear from the reports. Her VDP profile still lists her as cellar master, but it also still names the family as owners and is evidently out of date.
„Wir übergeben unser Lebenswerk mit Stolz und Vertrauen“ (our translation: “We are handing over our life’s work with pride and confidence”), Löwenstein said, according to Meiningers Sommelier. And, almost defiantly: „Und der Spirit von Heymann-Löwenstein lebt weiter!“ (our translation: “And the spirit of Heymann-Löwenstein lives on!”) Whether that proves true, the coming vintages will show. The walls, at any rate, are still standing – and the slate, as Löwenstein would put it, has the last word anyway.