Markus Molitor has been working in the vineyards since he was ten years old, literally becoming his father’s right-hand man after his father Werner lost his arm in an accident, “He needed support and help in the vineyard and cellar – so I became his right hand. He taught me all about viticulture and vinification and I spent every free minute with him in cellar or vineyard. I did not only learn every single step of winegrowing and winemaking, but I also took over his passion and enthusiasm.  One day we stood on the foot of Zeltinger Sonnenuhr vineyard site and looked up. My father told me about the glorious times of Mosel Riesling at the beginning of 20th century. I understood that the vines in these parcels, which were approx. 100 years old, were still the same.  So I asked myself: What has happened? Why do the wines not have the same reputation when all the preconditions have not changed at all? And that was the moment of inspiration for me. Since then my ambition has been very clear: I want to try to help restore the wines of our Mosel valley to their former glory by producing unmistakable Riesling wines true to their individual vineyard identity.” Markus took over control of the estate in 1984, which at that time amounted to just 1.5 hectares of the vineyard site Wehlener Klosterberg. Since then he has enlarged the holdings to 120 hectares comprising of many of the top Grand Cru sites on the steep slopes of the Middle Mosel and further south in Saar region. Markus Molitor is now among the largest privately owned estates in Mosel. 90% of the 120 hectares are planted with Riesling and various Pinot varieties. The goal has always been to produce very distinct expressions of each of the vineyard sites dotted throughout the Mosel  - “We try to express each individual character of vineyard in combination with each quality level, style and vintage. Therefore we harvest all of the vineyards by hand only to have the possibility of selecting each single berry in its own category. This work and time-intensive process leads to approx. 80 to 90 different wines per vintage, but each one absolutely unique in its composition and taste.” The whole team of workers in cellar, vineyards, office, warehouse and sales consists of approx. 80 people.  But this increases close to 120 people during the work intense period during the early summer months. Mapping the vineyards 1980-1990s To fulfil Markus’ ambition to reinvigorate the reputation of the great vineyards of Mosel he first began to focus purchasing the Grand Cru Sites of the Middle Mosel area beginning in the 1980s gradually buying more and more selected sites right through the 1990s. “One needs to imagine that until that time, it had been nearly impossible to obtain any plots
in these famous steep slopes.  Families passed these on from one generation to another. But in the 1980s the Mosel wine industry was completely devastated due to the glycol crisis and the overriding reputation of the mass-produced off-dry wines (highlighted in my “History of Mosel” article).  Nobody wanted to work the steep vineyards anymore. So for the first time in history, people offered it for sale or rent. I took the chance given and enlarged the vineyard surface to approximately 20 hectares in these vineyard sites.“ Asked what is so special about the steeper slopes of Mosel and the effects this has on the final wines Markus explains – “There are several advantages of steep slopes in comparison to flat vineyards. First of all the sun exposure: if the steep slope is south-facing, the sun moves
around each single vine from morning to evening. Secondly, the aeration is better because the winds blow down the slopes – the risk of frost is minimised, the heat as well as the humidity are carried away.  During the Indian summer prior to harvest, the temperatures may be quite warm during the day. The valley is narrow, so the heat is trapped in the valley. During the nights, the cold winds from the Eifel and Hunsrueck hills above fall down the steep slopes. These changes of warm and cool air contribute a lot to the formation of the unique Mosel-aromas in the Rieslings. Depending on the steepness and therefore the angle of incidence, the sunlight is reflected by the river in the vineyard and afterwards stored by the slate soil. It is the combination of all these points that leads to the unique effects of the steep slopes in our valley along with the interaction of the slate soils with the old vines."
 2000-2020 From 2000 onwards Markus started to purchase vineyards further south in the Saar Ruwer district. “I rented the first parcels in the vineyard site Niedermenniger Herrenberg in
the Saar river valley. This region really has its own character. The Saar and the Ruwer represent special variations of the Mosel Riesling. The side valleys are located at a slightly higher altitude and they are not as narrow. The average temperature is therefore a bit lower than in the Mosel region.  Due to these facts the vegetation period takes a bit longer (approx. 7-10 days). All of these components lead to Riesling wines with higher acidity, a bit more intensity, and a sharp and clean mineral expression and lighter fruit flavours than in the Middle Mosel region." In 2012 Markus was able to also secure some parcels in the famous steep slopes of Saarburger Rausch and Ockfener Bockstein in the Saar-Ruwer part of Mosel. In 2016 Markus got the chance to buy the former Staatsdomaine of Serrig which was built in 1903 by the Prussians, one of their government-led quality-driven wineries. Markus explains:  "It was 25 hectares of vineyards in one go, a unique possibility that I could not resist." As you go further east along the Mosel river and enter what is called Middle Mosel (identified into two separate regions named after the main towns of Piesport and Bernkastel and it is here the wine character changes slightly.  Markus explains: “The wines coming from Middle Mosel area are “warmer“ in taste: the fruitiness which often reminds me of exotic tropical fruits is more in the foreground, the wines are lush and rich in body. They are a bit smoother in acidity and pretty round in taste. However, it is worth noting that the differences between the areas have gotten much smaller over the last two decades due to the climatic change we are all faced by.“ In 2013 Markus expanded his vineyards east and took over parcels in the Kinheim district, namely in Kinheimer Rosenberg and Kinheimer Hubertuslay. “For me these vineyards were completely underrated and underestimated, therefore I wanted to (and I still want to) show their quality and make them famous all around the world.” During the last five years, Markus took the chances to piece together what he describes as his “personal jigsaw” of Grand Crus sites in the Middle Mosel area including the legendary Bernkasteler Doctor, Brauneberger Juffer (and Juffer-Sonnenuhr) as well as Erdener Prälat.  
 After 35 years of buying up single plots all over the region I ask what vineyards have become his favourites, he states, “It is like asking a father: which one of your children do you favour? It is hard to say which are more special than others due to the uniqueness of every single site, microclimate, steepness, slate soil composition, sun exposure, vines etc. All I can say is I believe all of them are justified to belong to the best vineyards of Mosel, of Germany, some even of the world and everyone of them has its own character. 
 Single vineyard characteristics and what defines them Identifying what is specific about the different vineyards along the Mosel is not simply geographical. Whilst Saar Ruwer is quite geographically and climatically different to Middle Mosel, each of the villages dotted along the Middle Mosel don’t simply represent different
styles of Riesling, the type of slate is perhaps a stronger factor.  Markus goes on to explain: “The character of a wine does not only depend on the village or better the vineyard site where it comes from. There are many more aspects influencing the taste and structure of a wine. The particular type of slate is responsible for the mineral and aromatics, as well as the acidity structure of the wine.  "It is distinguished by very specific local mineral compositions (mainly blue, grey and red slates, but there are many forms in between). In addition to that it depends a lot on the microclimate of the single parcel, on the slope and the sun exposure of the site, and those effects on the slate soil composition. There is also the age of the vines as well as their clones – and last but not least, it all depends on the philosophy of the winemaker. In general, we manage all our vineyards the same way. The work in the vineyard is of central importance because here the foundations are laid for physiologically ripe grapes full of extract to express their specificity of location.”
 Slate soils 
 The Mosel wine region is defined by its slate soils. All of Molitor’s vineyard soils are composed of slate – in nearly infinite variations. The main difference is the colour: grey, blue and red. But there are huge variations from vineyard to vineyard. Markus goes on “slate is a
very smooth stone which means that it can be very weathered. The stones may be splintered by hand. The vines´ roots are able to grow through the stony soil down to ten to twelve metres deep. They can collect many minerals through the different layers and transport it into the grapes (and therefore in a second step into the wines). It is distinguished by very specific local composition.  The slate reflects the sun and stores the heat so that the day and night temperature difference, especially during harvest, is not as high as in vineyards with other soils and therefore grapes do not only have light and warmth from above, but also from down below. In combination with the microclimate in the single vineyard site, the vines and the winegrowing philosophy, the wines vary from plot to plot: you may always recognise them as Mosel Riesling, but there are infinite possibilities from light to heavy, from expressive in mineral to spicy fruitiness, from cool to warm characters.”  Ungrafted vines "The character of a Riesling does not only depend on the age of vines, but also on the genetics grown in the vineyard. There can be young vines producing wines as full of character as from old vines, but these are really rare. In our vineyards we only plant selection
massalle, old genetics, because not only the age of vine, but the combination of both is crucial." "The ungrafted old vines in Mosel are getting rarer every year due to land consolidations. The winemakers are not allowed to plant ungrafted vines any longer because of the risk of phylloxera. But one is allowed to keep the old stocks in old plots. The root system of old vines is unique, it cannot be imitated.  Roots grow down to twelve metres deep in the mineral soil. They may take a lot of minerals into the grapes. The proportion of wood in comparison to the leaves and fruits is very high. Therefore the yield of old vines is extremely low – but the concentration of extracts and minerals in the juice of every single berry is extremely high. All these points lead to an incomparable structure and great texture in the wine. The balance of all components, mineral, acidity, fruitiness and sweetness is always given and inimitable." Explore more Editorial 

Since 1984 Markus Molitor has been managing his estate in Wehlener at the heart of the Middle Mosel, buying up some of the region's finest Grand Cru sites. Molitor provides a fascinating insight into these widely differing vineyards and how they have such a profound effect on the wines produced.

Markus Molitor owns several hectares of top Grand Cru sites in Mosel and Saar Germany. We explore how he has restored Riesling to its former glory.

Markus Molitor interview

Markus Molitor on his special Mosel project

I am too disorganised to call myself a collector, but I often find myself thinking about the multiple meanings of collecting. I have a room full of books left unread from one year to the next, whose mute reproach I feel every time I am in their presence. I have half a dozen radios, from Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper’s folding Brionvega TS502 to a Danish-made Beolit 707 from Bang & Olufsen, with its slide rule tuning device. I have a manual typewriter.  Most of us accumulate such random clutter. These were never possessions that were primarily about being useful – the Brionvega and the Beolit have long since been supplanted by a bluetooth speaker and a smartphone. They represent my membership of the design tribe.  The books carry other layers of meaning. My five years at university are on one shelf. The traces of the eight years I have spent writing a just-completed biography of Boris Iofan – Josef Stalin’s preferred architect – are spelled out in the titles of the books on another shelf. The typewriter was inherited from my father and it serves to remind me of childhood. The closest that I come to having a collection that a serious collector might acknowledge is in my chairs: a Rover chair that Ron Arad salvaged from a car, a Gio Ponti Superlegera, an Eames Lounger, a Harry Bertoia, George Sowden’s Palace chair from the 1983 Memphis collection and a deconstructed armchair designed by Rei Kawakubo. On a larger or smaller scale, humans develop complex relationships with their possessions that can go from the professionalism of full-blown collecting, to the casual significance of a row of junk shop finds on a mantlepiece. They can tell us a lot about ourselves. Marina Warner’s guide to the house in Hampstead, now run as a museum, in which Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life, offers an arresting insight into the significance that collecting had for him. She describes the ranks of ancient bronze, ceramic and marble figures parading across the desk that Freud brought with him to London from Vienna where he no longer felt safe due to Nazi occupation in 1938. Certainly, they are beautiful, and mostly they are precious. Thanks to their association with Freud, even the few that have been established as 20th-century forgeries will have become valuable. Some are almost 4,000 years old and reflect the religious and political practices of the distant past. Others, such as Freud’s art deco cigar case, come less freighted with history. But as Warner says, “they were also tools of thought, the kitchen utensils of his imagination”.   The batterie de cuisine of psychoanalysis included Egyptian coffin masks from the Roman period, Chinese jade and gold brooches, Roman glass, a 2,500-year-old sphinx, sarcophagus lids, Babylonian cylinder seals and Egyptian heart scarabs, as well as a 19th-century neck rest from New Guinea, modern metal porcupines, and Balinese figures. The pieces in pride of place on his desk, placed in apparently random order, were his special favourites, a tiny fraction of his collection that had become permanent fixtures. From time to time, Freud made space for a few new acquisitions to get a look in. “A collection to which there are no new additions is really dead,” he told his biographer Ernest Jones. After a short interval, most of the new things would be moved into the glass-fronted cabinets positioned around his study, where they were placed in more organised groups than those standing on his desk. Greek sculptures went on a shelf together. A cluster of representations of the Egyptian god Horus were grouped on another.  In Freud’s lifetime, the collection was continually changing. Before his move to London, he toured Vienna’s antiquities dealers almost every week on the look-out for new finds. He was ready to exchange pieces for items he could not afford to buy, and was generous in gifting pieces to friends and pupils he thought would appreciate them. Freud also had no qualms about buying items that came on the market in questionable circumstances, in particular, from the unofficial excavations (sometime after 1906) at a Roman fort in Hungary.   Despite the important part it played in his life, Freud wrote very little about collecting. The nearest that he came to spelling out what drove his interest in fragments of ancient sculpture, was when he compared his own exploration of the unconscious minds of his patients to an archaeological excavation of an ancient city. “The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.”  Freud was known to share his dining table with choice specimens to act as companions during a meal. “I must always have an object to love”, he confessed to his colleague and rival Carl Jung. When he was writing his book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1895, Freud spent the summer at Schloss Bellevue outside Vienna. He took a selection of what he called “my old grubby gods who take part in the works as paperweights for the manuscripts” with him.  Before Freud left Austria for England in 1938, his desk, his consulting room, and his study at Berggasse 19 were photographed by Edmund Engelman. Engelman’s 150 images helped Freud’s architect son Ernst to transpose the desk and its contents from a dark back room in a Viennese apartment to a sunlit Hampstead villa.  Like most collectors, Freud could never limit himself to a single field. Ronald Lauder the former MoMA chairman, for example, is known for the collection of Viennese modernism that forms the basis for his own museum, the Neue Galerie in New York. He also collects (in depth) in 15 other fields with little apparent connection between them. Lauder is fascinated by the work of the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata. He has a collection of arms and armour going back to The Crusades, and another of World War Two memorabilia. He owns some of Egon Schiele’s finest works, as well as various 18th-century French artworks. Fellow collector Rolf Fehlbaum (head of Vitra) has one of the largest collections of modern chairs in the world, and gave Frank Gehry his first European commission to design a gallery for it, but he is equally fascinated by toy robots manufactured in Japan since 1937. He calls them tiny kinetic sculptures. Where possible, he acquires their original packaging too. Perhaps the best way to understand the psychology of collecting is to see it as a spectrum. At one end, it is about order and control. In a messy and uncontrollable universe, a collection offers at least a semblance of certainty. A collection of this kind is based on provenance, completeness and authenticity. An over-restored vintage Bugatti is less desirable to a collector than one in original condition.  Every previous owner, every detail of its making forms part of its record. A red Olivetti typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass that once belonged to David Bowie was sold at Sotheby’s for US$65,000. You can buy one (that hasn’t been owned by Bowie) for US$750, which is still a lot of money for a piece of obsolete technology. Some collectors attempt to make patterns from the things that they acquire or, like jigsaw puzzlers, set out to complete a picture by locating every piece of a set. Some try to document the evolution of a species whether the subject of their interest is biscuit tins or the eggs of a particular type of bird. Some forms of collecting require the active engagement of the collector. Wildflowers need to be picked and dried quickly before they are pressed into a book. Butterfly collectors used macabre methods such as poison jars, or squeezing the thorax, to dispatch their prey without causing so much distress that they risk damaging delicate wings. At the other end of the spectrum, the accumulation of stuff by people who die alone in homes overwhelmed by stacks of ancient newspapers and tins of cat food, is a kind of sickness. It’s a condition that can overwhelm even the most celebrated of artists. In the last 17 years of his life, Andy Warhol filled a succession of cardboard boxes with a seemingly random accumulation of objects: taxi receipts, a vinyl Ramones single signed by Joey Ramone, a piece of an ancient, mummified foot, pastel-coloured corsets and a selection of metal dentures. Every time he had a full box, it was sealed and shipped off to storage in a warehouse in New Jersey. A typical box has 400 objects in it, some have as many as 1,200. Items in them include a piece of Caroline Kennedy’s wedding cake – Warhol seems to have been a regular guest at Kennedy weddings. He showed up 20 minutes after the wedding ceremony for Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger had started, in the company of Grace Jones. He was in black leather, and wearing two wigs; she had on a huge green fur hat.   Warhol’s boxes are a collection of the uncollectable and the uncontrollable, which, thanks to the resources of the Andy Warhol Foundation, has been tamed after six years of work by a dedicated group of archivists and cataloguers. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has aestheticised the cardboard boxes. They sit on back-lit shelves in the museum to suggest that this is not a random collection of trash that Warhol never looked at, but, in the view of the museum, is in fact a time-based art piece, comprising at least 500,000 objects that took 30 years to complete. It presents a considerably less impressive sight than British Regency period architect Sir John Soane’s museum. The architect of the Bank of England put as much effort into adapting his Lincoln’s Inn Fields house (and subsequently the two adjoining houses) to display his Hogarth paintings, a sarcophagus and his architectural models, as he did to accumulating the collection itself. The Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s novel, The Museum of Innocence is an eloquent exploration of the hoarding end of the collecting spectrum. What initially appears to be an account of a doomed love affair, quickly reveals itself as an exploration of the meaning of collecting. The story’s main protagonist Kemal starts acquiring things when his relationship with his lover Füsun is going well. When she drops an earring, he finds it and puts it to one side. As Füsun falls out of love with him, Kemal begins an increasingly desperate accumulation of objects that record their relationship. He picks up each of the cigarettes that she smokes. When she has stopped seeing him altogether, Kemal starts hanging around at her parents’ house and stealing pieces of cutlery that she might have used.  What makes Pamuk’s book particularly remarkable is that he acquired a house in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district that had belonged to a Greek merchant in the Ottoman era, and transformed it into a physical Museum of Innocence. It is, of course, very far from innocent; everything inside it is a lovingly created fiction. The first thing that you see once you get inside, is a wall covered with 4,213 cigarette ends, each of them carefully annotated in Pamuk’s neat handwriting, with imaginary details of the time and place they were smoked. The rest of the house is full of equally carefully fabricated objects from cosmetics to movie posters that reflect Pamuk’s vision of the modernising Turkey of the 1970s. “I think getting attached to objects happens in traumatic times and love is a trauma,” Pamuk once said. “Perhaps when they are in trouble, people hoard things.”  When Pamuk gave me a tour of his museum, he told me about meeting Warhol’s archivist, and expressed his reservations about the significance of the boxes in Pittsburgh. “Hoarding objects reaches the level of collecting only when there is a story that unites them,” he said. But that is a novelist criticising another, less narrative art form. While Freud’s desk in Hampstead was always useable, if overcrowded, the desk in fashion designer Paul Smith’s office in Covent Garden is completely overwhelmed with a snowdrift of collected objects that sweeps over an office chair, down onto the floor, and back up to the shelves that line every wall. There are stacks of books and magazines, cameras and mountains of vintage cycling jerseys. There is an i-Mac computer, a gift from Jony Ive that Smith has never used. Computers aren’t Smith’s thing. In any case, it’s too late now, short of purging half the contents of the room: there is no way to get near it. There are toy tin cars, collections of bottles from Moroccan markets, a pink bicycle and a lot of rabbits. “I once said in an interview that seeing a rabbit brings me luck, and they haven’t stopped pouring in ever since,” explains Smith. Collecting began, as did so many things in Smith’s career, with his early enthusiasm for cycling. Growing up in Nottingham in the 1950s, there was a newsagent which occasionally had a copy of L’Equipe, which would portray the heroes of the Tour de France in their yellow jerseys in colour on the cover, but in sepia inside. He bought the magazine, fascinated by the images, even if he couldn’t read it. “I can remember once saying, ‘I really like Jacques Anquetil’ to my father, which baffled him, since none of our family had ever been abroad. I saved my pocket money so that I could upgrade the gears on my bike from Simplex to Campagnolo. The box it came in was as important to me as the gear itself.”  What attracted Smith to the Campagnolo box, along with stamps and matchboxes which he has in large numbers – not just in his office but at his Nottingham HQ where he has an archivist trying to make sense of it all – is the way that designers can say so much in such a tiny space. He showed me a Japanese book of matches produced for a Tokyo nightclub in the 1970s. “It so clearly says it’s ‘contemporary’. You can hear the jazz already.”  Despite the huge assortment of assembled objects, Smith is reluctant to describe himself as a collector. “I just have a large quantity of the same things,” he says, matter of factly. “In my head, a collector is someone who selects an item or a subject. They collect them because they know a lot about them. Maybe I have a little knowledge about cycling jerseys.  In the early 1980s, on my first trips to Japan and India, I just got a bit carried away. I bought lots of Japanese furniture. In India, for some reason, I bought 15 wardrobes, and a piece of furniture that doubled as a staircase with drawers.” Smith had them all sent home on the Trans-Siberian Express.  He suggests that his is a collection that has found him. “Things collect me,” he says. “For some reason I started to be sent things, and they still keep coming.” There is an individual who regularly sends Smith artefacts that come unwrapped but covered in postage stamps. Others send him letters, toys, books and even ancient packets of razor blades. One visitor took careful photographs of his office, and later sent him a precisely detailed model of his office, complete with its chaotic contents. Smith’s London home, where he lives with his wife Pauline, is much calmer. “The house is hers. I do have one room for my stuff, but it’s mostly at the office that I get to look at things.” In 1996, patron of the arts and barrister Jill Ritblat gave the V&A Museum the largest single donation of clothes in its history, more than 1,000 items. There are ski outfits in postmodern pastel shades from the 1980s, and challenging Japanese experiments from Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, as well as couture from Dior and Saint Laurent. There is work by Alexander McQueen, Biba, Mary Quant, and Christian Lacroix, Emanuel Ungaro and Victor Edelstein, and an evening outfit produced by a dressmaker based on an idea of Ritblat’s own design.  The early days of British fashion from the 1960s are represented by Foale and Tuffin, and Zandra Rhodes, and from the 1980s by Margaret Howell and Katharine Hamnett. There is tailoring from Tommy Nutter and work by Giorgio Armani. It is by no means a complete account of contemporary fashion, but it is certainly extensive, and like the personal wardrobe that it is, combines some very special pieces made for family occasions, with more everyday wear. The connecting thread of Ritblat’s collection is Ritblat herself. These were all pieces that she had bought to wear. They were not chosen like stamps, or old masters, or celadon vases to make a self-conscious collection, but were the result of a continuing sequence of choices over time. Taken together they are a reflection of her life as an English woman of a certain background, at a particular time in the country’s history. “I never saw it as a collection, it was more like my diary, though I have never had time to write a diary. Each piece brings back memories of when I wore it,” says Ritblat. She made her first donation to the V&A at the end of 1996, but kept back the things that she wanted to be able to go on using, and they formed the core of a donation to the Design Museum of another 400 items in 2013. Ritblat is ambivalent about fashion. As a child she was somewhat self-conscious about being dressed by her mother, who had studied fashion herself. She was relieved to be able to assume the camouflage of the complex uniform rituals of an English public school for girls in the 1950s. “I loved my school uniform at Roedean; we were expected to change our clothes four times a day, as chic as anything. Scratchy afternoon dresses, regulation school loafers, very nice blazers and pleated skirts.” As a student barrister, she found herself adopting the formal uniform of the legal profession, but then as a married woman began to build a wardrobe that reflected the life that she was leading. Later, when she was making her own choices, she was early to discover Miuccia Prada. “What you pick out is based on whether it suits you and on the zeitgeist,” she explains. Smith, Heseltine and Ritblat represent three very different approaches to collecting. For Smith, the unruly mountain of things in his office, is, like the collection on Sigmund Freud’s desk, part of the tools of his imagination, a source of imagery and ideas for his work as a designer. It’s also a means of establishing his personality. Heseltine’s garden is an investment of time, resources and creativity in the remaking of a place that speaks to the future using living organisms that will outlive us all. Ritblat’s clothes are a record of the full life of an individual. All of these collections provide insights into unique people, their lives and times. In their different ways all three reflect on the nature of collecting, and its ability to be a creative activity in itself. In a world in which technology threatens to abolish the material world altogether, objects have not lost their allure. Their physical condition marks the passing of time in ways that pixels and code cannot do. Collecting is the means all of us have to create histories of our times, and even more, of ourselves. This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two. 

In order to explore the mindset of the collector, Deyan Sudjic shines a light on the collected objects of Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol, and speaks to three British collectors to better understand what it is that makes collecting such a vital part of the human experience.

Exploring the mindset of the collector and why the act is a vital part of the human experience, with a focus on Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol

FONDATA: Exploring the art of collecting 

 I Collect, Therefore I Am

Domdechant Werner

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The lowest price you're willing to sell at. If the net price goes below this value your listing will be removed.

shows all the items that you have pre-ordered, including en primeur wines, and all the items on your watchlist.

Futures

You can set a floor price on items you're selling based on a % of current unit net value.

You can set a market price on items you're selling based on a % of current unit net value.

shows all the actions that you have taken on items in your Portfolio.

groups every action by type - Purchase, Sale, Delivery, and Inbound Transfer - so it's clear at a glance what happened to each item.

History

shows all the items that are currently in transit to or from {shortName}.

In transit

Local delivery is free for orders over HK$1,800 (to a single location). For orders below this value, delivery is HK$150 for up to four cases and HK$50 per case thereafter.

Shipping starts from €15 within Italy and €45 to Switzerland and the rest of Europe for up to 48 bottles (75cl). Costs vary by destination. Larger shipments can be quoted on request.

The date shown below is when your order will ship from our local warehouse. Your final delivery date, along with full tracking details, will be provided once our team has processed your request.

You can arrange collection from our Retail store on 22nd Floor, 8 Wyndham Street, Central Hong Kong.
Collection times are between 9:30am-13:00 and 14:00-18:00pm, Monday to Friday. We are closed on public holidays.

You can arranged collection from our warehouse STI INTERNAZIONALE SPA, on Viale del Lavoro, 57, 37051 Bovolone, Verona.
Pick-up hours are between 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM and 1:30 PM to 5:30 PM, Monday to Friday. We are closed on public holidays.

This is the current estimated market value for this item.

Manually set prices will be overwritten. Already listed wines are not affected.

Updates all unlisted wines to current market price.

Set all at market

represents all the wines you currently have in your Portfolio that aren't stored with us. Press the

My cellar

Name

Net price

New portfolio available

New portfolio

You do not have any invoices at this time.

shows all the items from your Portfolio that are currently on the market.

On sale

shows all the items you currently have in your Portfolio. You can perform individual actions on them from this page.

Overview

shows any items that are currently awaiting user action.

Pending

This is the dynamic market price of the item with trading margin removed.

This is the amount of profit you will receive if your listing sells.

Pre-authorised payments enable automatic transactions on your behalf, ensuring seamless and hassle-free payments. This allows recurring charges, subscriptions, or scheduled payments to be processed without manual approval each time.

The number of cases you wish to place on sale

Your catalogue item will be archived. Are you sure you want to continue?

Your catalogue items will be archived. Are you sure you want to continue?

Before you request delivery, you can adjust the quantity for each item in your selection below.

*Market price is dynamic and may change. At time of sale a 10% trading fee will be deducted from the final sale price.

Total market price*

The fixed custom price you wish to sell each item for.

Split into {caseSize} individual {bottleSize}cl bottles.

Title

shows all the items you currently store with us. These items can be sold.

Available for sale — items stored with {name} eligible to be listed on the marketplace.

Profile

This item is at FINE+RARE, available for storage, transfer or delivery.
 Most UK deliveries can be made within 3-5 working days, with next day delivery for London;
 an exact date will be available when arranging delivery.
 International deliveries have longer lead-times, please contact us for details.

This item is at FINE+RARE HOME Hong Kong, available for delivery or local pickup. Most Hong Kong deliveries can be made within 3 working days, an exact date will be available when arranging delivery. International deliveries have longer lead-times, please contact us for details.

Wines sold en primeur will be released from the producer after bottling, typically 18 months after the so-called campaign ends. Your wine will then be stored by FINE+RARE in a bonded warehouse until you decide to take delivery.

We will source this item at the guaranteed price from our network of suppliers and arrange expedited shipment to FINE+RARE.
 The lead-time depends on many variables, but 2-4 weeks is typical for expedited sourcing.
 Once your order is confirmed, we'll keep you updated on its ETA.
 Every item is checked on arrival by our expert team, with photographs available on request (please note that charges may apply).

We will source this item at the guaranteed price from our network of suppliers and arrange shipment to FINE+RARE.
 The lead-time depends on many variables, but 6-12 weeks is an average estimate.
 Once your order is confirmed, we'll keep you updated on its ETA.
 Every item is checked on arrival by our expert team, with photographs available on request (please note that charges may apply).

Domdechant Werner

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