L&R Kox Pinot Noir 2020

Location: Luxembourg, Moselle Luxembourgeoise

Winemaker: Corinne Kox

Grapes: Pinot Noir

Soil: Remich Primerberg. No herbicides or pesticides, only natural treatments administered by a drone.

Winemaking: Hand picked. Native yeast fermentation. Sans sulfites. Destemmed, fermented in concrete, aged luxembourgish oak for twelve months.

From the Importer Steven Graf: The Kox family have been cultivating their rich vineyards for generations, their house and first wine cellar were built on the estate in 1909. The winery was founded in 1977 by Laurent and Rita Kox, when they took over the family’s business in order to transform it from a grape cultivating to a wine making domain. Today, the family has expanded the winery to 10 hectares and produces typical and atypical Mosel wines. Short macerations and low to no added sulphites for light and fresh Mosel wines. Corinne is now holding the reins at L&R Kox, and doing really incredible things. Luxembourg is a good place to be a winemaker. It's a northern region that, recently, has been smiled on by a warming climate. You are growing grapes along the famous and storied Mosel river. You share in a community of winemakers producing world-class wines with a continual eye towards progression and perfection. In this regard, the tiny winemaking region of Luxembourg is unparalleled in the world. Pound for pound, there is no region that completely operates at such a level of quality, idiosyncrasies concerning style aside.

This has to do with cultural factors, but also economic factors. In Luxembourg, you are financially insured for up to 60% of your loss for frost and hail, and there are further subsidies for winemakers interested in Organic conversion or other such moves towards sustainability. And as cynical as we might be about where the money comes from or the fairness of the leg-up these vignerons get, the result is a region where workers are well paid and the vast majority of vignerons are working sustainably at the very least. These policies ought to be a necessity for any country with an agricultural economy.

This utopian future is no better epitomised by anyone besides Corinne. Corinne is a scientist, a doctor of microbiology, and a daughter of a winemaking family that spans generations. She makes great wine because she is curious and bold enough to make the experiments and sincerely analyze the results. In any given year, she will make 60+ cuvées. These come from a number of parcels, a variety of grapes, rendered with a number of techniques. In recent years, Corrine has been experimenting with spontaneous fermentations, zero sulfur wines, unfining/unfiltering, macerations, and she even picked up a couple of anforas from Georgia. She simply has to know. She makes wines with incredible precision and tact, but what the entire Luxembourgish region is really obsessed with beyond site-specific riesling is crémant. In fact, Corinne's father learned to make sparkling wine in Champagne in the 70's, with ideas of making Luxembourgish Champagne from his incredible, limestone terroirs. And he did, until France decided that 'Champagne' was only for the Champenoise, and Luxembourg became the first region to produce a sparkling wine called, 'Crémant'. So, since then, this has been a place for delicious sparkling wine that is mostly consumed domestically.