Auxer-what? It's what the Luxembourg Locals drink
Cruising along the Luxembourg Wine Route, winding along the Moselle river with Germany just across the placid waters, you’d be forgiven for blowing right past the Schmit-Fohl winery. Tucked into the little village of Ahn, the winery is shoe-horned into a hodgepodge of buildings that blend seamlessly into the rest of town. Hidden behind the clean plastered facades, is a retrofitted and throughly modern winery, where brothers Nicolas and Mathieu are making bevy of precise, expressive and utterly gulp-able wines.
When I sat down with Nicolas Schmit in November, his tired eyes matched my jet-lagged ones. I had just flown 10 hours to Paris, followed by a 4 hour drive. He had just survived another busy harvest, followed by a month of barreling down wines, and a top-to-bottom cleaning of the cellar. It was time for a rest. Still, he and I were both ready, as he pulled bottle after bottle from behind the tasting room counter, and poured one wine after another with a mischievous grin — You just can’t stop this guy.
As an eight-generation Luxembourgish winemaker, Nicolas is building on a long tradition of wine making, without accepting the status quo. His grandfather was the first to plant Chardonnay in Luxembourg in 1946 — unheard of at the time —and that spirit of quietly subversive innovation runs through everything he does.
After Nicolas poured his sparkling wines (don’t fret…we’ll be talking about those soon!), he moved onto a still white and dropped a comment that caught my attention.
“I love Auxerrois; if I could only work with one grape, it would be Auxerrois.”
We’ll that’s a bold statement! In a region known for fine Riesling and world-class bubbly, Nicolas was championing a grape that most would blend away. But he elaborated, “Farmed at low-yields, it’s expressive, it reflects the soils… it’s fruity and fresh, and makes a very versatile wine you can drink anytime.”
I couldn’t argue with that; the Auxerrois, which is a distant relative of Chardonnay, is immediately catching - aromatic, thirst-quenching and that easy drinkability that explains why the Schmitt-Fohl wines barely make it a few dozen kilometers from the cellar before they’re gone. This is the type of daily quaffer that gets rolled out by the pallet-load, and gleefully guzzled by the thirsty locals down the road who are happy to keep it to themselves.
Maison Viticole Schmit-Fohl Auxerrois Ahn Goellebour 2024
Luxembourg’s third most important grape, after Riesling and Rivaner, Auxerrois is naturally lower in acidity than either, which lets the fruit do the talking without sacrificing freshness. This bottle is delightfully packed with stone fruit, fragrant spring blossoms, a whisper of fresh cut grass, and a dry mineral zing on the finish that is pure Moselle.
Lucky for us, Nicolas has traveled the winemaking world and think it’s pretty cool that some of his bottles travel as far as he has. With 10 cases headed our way, it’s time to let a few more people in on the secret!