In its first year, an abandoned vineyard still looks harmless. In the second, brambles run riot; by the fifth, birches are standing between the stakes; and after ten years the vineyard can be recognised only by its walls, which are slowly slumping in on themselves. On the Mosel this film can be watched in real time in many places. According to the German Wine Institute, as quoted by the German Press Agency (dpa), the region’s area under vine shrank by around 160 hectares in 2025, chiefly because of the labour-intensive nature of Steillagen viticulture – farming on steep slopes.
The decline is nothing new. At a 2011 conference held by the Rheinischer Verein für Denkmalpflege und Landschaftsschutz, the Rhineland society for heritage and landscape protection, the winegrower and viticultural scientist Ulrich Stein reported that the planted vineyard area on the Mosel had fallen from 12,200 to 8,800 hectares since 1990. All the more remarkable, then, are the people working in the opposite direction.
Why steep sites are abandoned
The answer is there in every set of figures, even if the numbers vary from source to source. A spokesperson for the German Wine Institute told dpa that a well-mechanised flat site needs around 200 working hours per hectare per year and a steep site 1,000 – five times as many. For the terraced Calmont, the DWI elsewhere gives up to 1,800 hours. The Heymann-Löwenstein estate in Winningen calculates that working by hand takes „an die 2000 Stunden“ (our translation: “around 2,000 hours”) to farm one hectare sensibly and sustainably, compared with 250 to 600 hours on mechanised sites. The figures do not match exactly, because they compare different sites and ways of working. But they all point to the same order of magnitude: handwork on a steep slope costs many times more.
Legally, incidentally, a steep site is clearly defined – at least on the label. Under § 34b of the German Wine Regulation, “Steillage” or “Steillagenwein” may appear on a bottle only if the grapes come from land with a gradient of at least 30 per cent. For subsidy programmes and planting rights, different definitions apply in some cases, as Das Deutsche Weinmagazin points out. German thoroughness, it seems, allows for more than one truth even when it comes to gradients.
Calmont: 112 plots, one idea
An early example comes from Bremm. In 1999, according to his estate, Ulrich Franzen acquired a 1.5-hectare area in the Calmont with the help of the Mayen land consolidation office, spread across 112 individual plots; he cleared the land, which had lain fallow for decades, and replanted it by hand with some 7,900 Riesling vines. When Franzen died in a work accident in June 2010, Vinum paid tribute to him as a winegrower whose new plantings had helped halt the abandonment of the Calmont and who had campaigned for a monorack railway and climbing paths. His son Kilian Franzen now runs the estate with his wife Angelina. How the Calmont is faring as a whole is the subject of our piece on Europe’s steepest vineyard.
Vollenweider: a Swiss in the Goldgrube
Daniel Vollenweider came from Graubünden and originally trained as a surveying technician; according to Vinum, he learned winemaking in Malans and, from the 1990s, at the Mosel estate Dr. Loosen. According to Chambers Street Wines, he started in 1999 with 1.3 hectares in the Wolfer Goldgrube near Traben-Trarbach; he founded his estate in 2000. The New York merchant describes the Goldgrube as a first-rate site that had fallen out of use at the time. Where the forest now creeps into the slope, long-abandoned plots remain to this day, with old wooden stakes still poking out between the trees and scrub. The Goldgrube has partly ungrafted vines, some of them, according to the estate, more than a hundred years old.
The one hectare became around five, 90 per cent of it in the Goldgrube, according to the estate. Vollenweider died in July 2022, aged 52. Moritz Hoffmann, co-owner since 2019, continues to run the estate, since 2025 together with Vinzent Ewest.
The klitzekleine Ring: mountain rescue as a collective
Vollenweider was also part of a group that has made rescue its programme. By its own description, the klitzekleine Ring – literally the “teeny-tiny ring” – is an association of around ten winegrowers from the area around Traben-Trarbach; according to the designers of its identity, the name is an ironic nod to the wine industry’s traditional associations. According to the Johann Lenz estate, the group has hosted a “Tafelrunde” (round table) every September since 2005. Its joint wine is called “Bergrettung” – “mountain rescue” – and comes from plots that would otherwise be lost, drawn, as the Johann Lenz estate puts it, „je nach dem, wo grade eine Fläche durch unsere Weiterbewirtschaftung für den Weinbau erhalten bleiben muss“ (our translation: “from wherever a plot currently needs our continued cultivation to be kept for viticulture”).
The first stop was the Enkircher Ellergrub, which yielded Bergrettung wine from the 2006 vintage onwards. The plot later passed to a winegrower from Traben-Trarbach. The second was a parcel in the Trabener Zollturm – according to Mosel Fine Wines and weinverkostungen.de, around 0.3 hectares of old vines – which the Ring farmed from 2009 and handed over in 2016 to Gernot Kollmann’s Immich-Batterieberg estate. The model is simple: the group looks after a plot until someone takes it on permanently.
Lambertskirch: cuttings from centenarians
On the Saar, Florian Lauer of the Peter Lauer estate in Ayl brought the small Lambertskirch site back to life. According to Mosel Fine Wines, the then Hausen-Mabilon estate had grubbed up the vines there in 2000. In 2010 the Lauers bought the overgrown plot, cleared it straight away and replanted it in 2012; 2014 was the first vintage. The estate’s catalogue likewise gives 2010 as the year the vineyard was freed from scrub, and says it was planted with cuttings from hundred-year-old Riesling vines from the Saar valley. Today the VDP lists Lambertskirch as the estate’s monopole and as a VDP.Große Lage, the association’s top, grand cru-equivalent tier of sites. There is more on the estate in our portrait on Peter Lauer’s cask numbers.
What the state contributes
The rescuers are not entirely on their own. Through its EULLa agri-environment programme, Rhineland-Palatinate funds the measure “Umweltschonender Steil- und Steilstlagenweinbau” (environmentally sound viticulture on steep and very steep slopes) – according to the CAP Strategic Plan 2023 to 2027, at €765 per hectare per year on steep sites and €2,555 on the steepest. The conditions: erosion protection over winter, rules on crop protection and, on the steepest sites, no road-building and no removal of dry-stone walls. Set against 1,000 to 2,000 working hours, this is more an encouragement than full funding.
Why it is worth it all the same
A rescued steep site is more than a vineyard. Species that are scarcely found elsewhere live on the dry-stone walls. Heymann-Löwenstein points, for example, to the Apollo butterfly, whose caterpillars feed mainly on white stonecrop, a plant of rocks and walls. Then there are the old, often ungrafted vines, which do not grow back once they have been grubbed up, and a cultural landscape on which a good share of Mosel tourism depends.
Economically it remains a gamble. But the examples show that it takes more than subsidies: it takes people willing to think in terms of 112 separate plots, to turn a forest back into a vineyard, or to carry a plot together with their neighbours until a successor is found. Anyone who buys a bottle from a steep Mosel site is therefore paying not only for the wine but also for a piece of landscape.