The church bells ring at 11.30am. The sound was carried to our fields on the slow wind, distant and serious. In Mosel, this is the sound of lunchtime.

We’re not ready to stop yet, and we only had our morning coffee break what feels like minutes ago. The fields are thick with fragrant forest herbs and nettles that reach up over my wellies. I keep dropping my grapes into the vegetation around my ankles and stinging my bare, wet hands. It’s my second day of harvest, and I’m fast, but I’m clumsy.

Above me is a low, grey sky and the peak of a hilly ridge, blanketed by tightly knitted rows of birch and pine trees. “Up there is a Roman farm,” Rudi had said when we arrived, pointing up to an impossibly high point shrouded by darker pines. Rudi—Rudolf Trossen—is our leader, and the owner of Weingut Trossen, or Trossenwein, a biodynamic winery in Kindel, mid-Mosel. He and Rita, his wife and partner in everything, make some of the most highly-acclaimed Riesling in the world, from the grapes we will be harvesting from his biodynamic fields.

I cut another heavy bunch of grapes from a pole-standing vine. When the light shines on a cluster of Riesling, the acid green gives off a tinge of silver-blue. Semi-opaque, their seeds appear through their skins like a faint reflection, faking iridescence. I trim from it a small patch of sunburned berries, tiny and shrivelled like currants against their pale and perfect siblings. We were told we didn’t have to do this; still, every so often I enjoyed adding this touch of professionalism.

“We don’t macerate [leaving the skins and seeds of the grapes in contact with the wine or juice to intensify tannin, colour and flavour—orange and red wines are made this way],” Rudi had explained.

“Maceration means having a uniform,” he says, by way of cryptic explanation. “Bottles of wine like marching soldiers.”

In Rudi’s wines, the grapes are pressed as soon as they make the mile-long journey home, and then the juice is hurried away to ferment naturally; no skin contact, no additional sugars or yeasts, no forced consistency.

On my next bunch—smaller, but beautiful all the same—a lacing of powdery botrytis [or noble rot, a fungus that sweetens and intensifies the flavour of the grapes as it wraps them in decay] turns plump, shining berries luxurious velvety shades of lavender and mauve. On my first day, Rudi had told me about the magic of this fungus.

No doubt reading my reactions (I have no poker face) he’d encouraged me to eat the nobly rotten grapes I’d picked to understand their value. The flavour was spiced and honeyed—much richer than I expected from a grape—and the tang that came from the seeds as I crunched reminded me of sherbert.

“It’s not just picking grapes... It’s a pleasure for all senses. I come from a long tradition of farming that ended with my grandparents. I’m feeling grateful that this harvest somehow connects me closer to them.”

— France Dejonckere, lifestyle influencer and Trossen harvest team member

At night, we sat closely huddled on benches in Rita and Rudi’s “hall,” the barn at the back of the house where the wine press and all the more eccentric artefacts collected over their lifetime are stored. Around a well-used dining table, under a banner Rudi had made to protest the building of a nearby motorway bridge, we shared tastes from a never-ending selection of bottles and talked about grapes, wine fairs, music and the world.

Between pours Rudi would cross to the other side of the room to change CDs from jazz to Roxy Music to Cocteau Twins, or to check on the press—which ran constantly every evening—or to be persuaded to play endless games of table football.

Around this table, Riesling was obviously the main event. Crisp sparkling rosé brought from Maison Crochet, just a hop over the French border, added a flashy glint of fresh, dry fizz. A Heinrich Muscat Freyheit 2017 from nearby Austria added florals, fennel, creaminess and skin-contact character. But it was the Trossenweins we were all there to taste. Kestenbusch Purus, Schieferstern and Schieferblume, Eule and Trossen Rot, from any year—pick and pour. We drank, and we listened, and we thought, and we cracked fresh walnuts, and we soaked it all in.

Some of our group were wine experts: a sommelier and tutor from Frankfurt; a collector who travels the world in search of bottles whose stories move him; two natural wine lovers looking for drinks to share at their New York supper clubs; a future winemaker completing his oenology and viticulture masters in-between harvest hours.

Some of us were not: an online-famous content creator; a photographer and musician; a biologist; me, a beer writer curious about wine. Our reasons for travelling to Mosel were different but were easily tied together with the same twine. We all wanted to learn the secrets of Rudi’s wines for ourselves.

“Wine isn’t about vocabulary, it’s about what you can taste, what you can sense… It’s about how it makes you feel and what you can experience.”

— Inge Mainzer, sommelier, consultant, and Trossen harvest team member

Before I arrived, I felt embarrassed that I’d been anticipating working in the vineyards as a type of life experience. For many, the work is daily and backbreaking. This realisation became real on the drive from the airport, as Rudi explained the fates of the abandoned vineyards we could see from on the hillsides as we passed.

“The families left,” he said as we navigated the bridges over the winding Mosel—we had just met, and I felt like he was gently testing my grit. “These fields are very steep, it’s hard work and the soil isn’t as good this far from the best slopes. It’s not worth it for them, and they move to the cities.”

On my first day, I learned. Standing on a slippery slate-quartz incline with a heavy bucket of grapes while the wind whips around your damp face isn’t as fun as it sounds. I could see why so many had left their vineyards. The harvest probably isn’t packed full of life-affirming moments when every grape represents your entire living.

Yet, in the same breath, I couldn’t understand it at all. On the slopes of a parcel called Eule, kites hovered within reach, tracking the steeper rows below us for mice and rabbits, the chilly air ruffling perfect, russet feathers. Clouds of starlings burst up from the ground in liquid murmurations, black against a pale sky.

The smooth grey river passed below all of us, reflecting the sun back into the fields, proudly proving everything I’d read about the Mosel’s topography right. Eule itself was named after an owl who’d played sentry from a rock, Rudi told us, guarding his vines from stooping pickers. The air smelled of moss and earth and distant fires and being alive. Under our feet was a carpet of wild strawberries. I picked and ate them. I was smiling while I worked.

When break-time came to the fields each morning and afternoon, we ate homemade cakes crumbly with hazelnuts and chocolate, and drank Federweisser [or Federweißer, a young, still-fermenting grape juice] poured into coffee mugs from tall green bottles. These bottles were filled each morning from a huge teardrop-shaped demijohn in the pressing hall as we each raised a glass of Riesling schnapps and toasted the day ahead. I loved that first taste of Federweisser each day—a sweet, sugary juice that fizzed like the ripest Pink Lady apples and left strawberry sherbert and dusty yeast dancing on my tongue.

“My wines need time to come to earth. When they start they are babies; angels in the sky.”

— Rudolf Trossen, winemaker

At lunchtime, we huddled into the muddy van, or climbed onto the tractor, and headed back to the house.

“Stop now,” Rudi would shout. “The grapes can wait. The cooks cannot.”

In Rita and Rudolf Trossen’s home is a warm kitchen with a constant supply of hot coffee. Afternoon and evening, Rita and a changing army of family members would provide hot soup, paprika-spiced sausages, bread and weinkäse: a local cheese crafted to suit the region’s fruity, high-acid wines.

We often ate our evening meal in the garden in coats and blankets, on a long table from where we could look out over the river towards hills furrowed with vines, some of them Trossenwein’s. As if this proximity from their grapes was too far for them to handle, Rita and Rudi have Riesling trailing across a pergola in the garden too.

We sat together and talked. In the beginning, we talked about our lives; who we are, what we do, what brought us to Trossen. Towards the end of our time there we talked about wine and grapes and the rain, and the rapidly tumbling Autumn. We spent so much time getting to know it, the weather became another member of our table.

One evening I noticed a window ledge by our dinner table decorated with quartz, slate and cow horns. These are some of the ingredients Rudi uses every year to anoint his fields. While in biodynamics no one action is more important than the rest, these cow horns represent a vital part of Rudi and Rita’s ritual.

Horns just like these were filled with manure from a neighbouring farm and buried in Lay, a field high above the village, a week or so before I arrived. There they’d stay over autumn, winter and the turn of spring to gather energy from the changing seasons. At Easter, they’ll be dug up and the contents will be spread among each of the Trossen parcels. Rudi has been committed to this practice for 41 years.

“With sulphur, you only oxidise your mind.”

William Vermeylen, wine collector and Trossen harvest team member

Rudolf and Rita converted their entire estate to biodynamic methods in 1978 and began making natural, sulphite-free wines in 2010, in addition to their range of traditional wines which have sulphur additions. The reason I’d come to Trossen was to see biodynamics in action, and despite my total open-mindedness, I could understand why there is some cynicism around the practice.

All I can say is that it helps to have someone like Rudi explain it to you. In his own blend of smiling matter-of-factness and lyrical similes, it makes sense. It has been good for his grapes, and his wines have thanked him for it. What else is there to know?

My favourite of Rudi’s wines is Schieferstern Purus 2018, a wine with no added sulphur and a bright, fresh apple aroma which tasted tart and vibrant; it’s flavour long and elegant, but punchy. Rudi was particularly happy with his 2018 wines. That year it was hot and the sun was unpleasant to toil under, but evidently it made for a great vintage. I was thrilled to have been working in the 2019 rain and enjoying the fruits of their labour each evening.

Tasting one or two of his expressive, energetic, unusually graceful Rieslings helps too. They are totally unique. There is no short explanation why. It’s skill and patience, faith and expertise and a million more things besides. One evening we arrived home for supper and Rudi was pressing the day’s harvest, Radiohead’s Subterranean Homesick Alien blasting.

“Something was missing in my understanding of Rudi’s wines,” Inka Mainzer, a German sommelier and wine tutor I had been picking with all week, said as we pulled off our wellies in the hall. She smiled like she’d heard a secret. “I get it now.”

Illustrations by Tida Bradshaw.