The Wine... Is fruity, with lime, peach, pear, baking apple flavors. Spicy aromas of cinnamon and other subtle exotic spices are present, alongside floral aromas. A wine complex enough to merit many glasses of dissection and discussion. Drinkers of Vouvray, Austrian whites, and even New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs will like this.

The Brothers... The Merkelbachs tend to a tiny (1.9 hectare) amount of land in Ürzig, at the far northern end of the good part of the Mosel. They pull fruit from the massive, grand hillside that frames the town, an impossibly steep mass of slate and vine that directly faces the wide, slow-moving Mosel. I spent four days of my last vacation in Ürzig. What better way to escape from the rigors of tasting wine for a living than to hide out in a tiny German village known for only one thing? That thing ain’t quality restaurants, which is a shame because the three streets that make up the entirety of Ürzig are dotted with more than their fair share of exceptional wineries.

The Land... I think when my child is old enough I’ll go back to show her what a town should be like, how life could be, away from ugly modernity and impermanence. Even if Rolf and Alfred are gone – and the brothers are sadly among the last and maybe the best of a vanishing generation of small family wine estates – I think Ürzig will be the same.

The Vineyards... I love the names of these sites. Rosenberg (rose mountain) makes clean, vivid, fresh wines that smell markedly of flowers. It’s the most northerly of the sites the Merkelbachs utilize. It also marks the northern boundary of quality viticulture along this river. On a cool fall evening I enjoyed a bottle of local wine in a riverside restaurant in Wolf, Kinheim’s northern neighbor, but the bottle I ferried home seemed surprisingly ordinary. So I’m sticking to my story: Kinheim represents the frontier. Never underestimate how much a pretty setting can charm your palate. To the south Merkelbach’s great holdings continue. Erdener Treppchen (so steep Megan turned back at this point in our hike, for fear of vertigo) and Ürziger Würzgarten (spice garden, a grand amphitheater vineyard that to me yields every flavor Riesling should have.) Not surprisingly, brothers Merkelbach grow only Riesling, and the sum of the wines they bottle from these great sites is a scant 1,600 cases annually.

The Struggle... To end on an insufferably serious note, it is my belief that the creation of wine from this vertical landscape is heroic. It demonstrates how man can harness and work within nature to create something that is the sum of our our abilities and hers. This special little time capsule: a year in the life of one plot of vines, in a bottle.