Loosen is the Mosel producer behind Dr. Loosen, and he was describing an experiment to revive his great-grandfather's dry-wine method, which took him most of his working life to get right. The line is aimed at natural and orange winemakers who say they don't intervene: his point is not that intervention is good in itself, but that you cannot make something you have not first imagined. He was blunt elsewhere in the same conversation about growers who pick by acidity rather than ripeness.
…call it always the historic winemaking, so between 1870 and 1930, you know, because I got a very old bottle from a very old customer who still knew my great-grandfather, you know? And he brought me in 1947, you know, this one, you know, Berziger Würzgarten, what we call nowadays reserve, you know?
Yes.
And I thought, okay, dry wines, I'm not sure if they can really age that, because the wine was already 56 years old. But I had been this customer who brought me a bottle as a present. I said, oh, you know, that is still from your great-grandfather. And so you know that your grand-grandfather made only dry wines. I said, yes, I've heard about it, but never had a bottle, you know. And so weeks later, I opened it and I said, fuck, you know, what did this old man did, you know, making dry wines, which are still after 50, 60 years, brilliant. Sure, matured, you know. Maturation is something different as oxidation, but perfectly matured. I love this wine so much that I've been going back to my cellar master, to my, you know, winemaker, and said, Bernie, I think that was 25 years ago or whatever. And I said, Bernie, we have to go back to this old tradition of my great-grandfather making dry wines like he did. They are brilliant, even after 50 years, this 47, they showed so…
the wine. Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, so from that point, it was a very exciting thing. And we do these things in the dry style, as my great-grandfather made it in the dry style. And here this year, oh, let's taste it because this is a beautiful apparatus wine, you know? 7.5 alcohol only. That is a beautiful wine just in the…
I have not prepared this question, but since you touched on it, so what was the difference between? The 1971 and then before that. Yeah,