93 Mosel Fine Wines

"This starts off with a touch of reduction underlined by yeasty notes before gradually developing beautifully elegant and floral notes paired with yellow peach, dried spices and pineapple. The wine is compact, dense and concentrated on the palate yet at no point gives the impression of being unnecessarily weighty. More yellow fruits and spices emerge in the long and complex finish. Bittersweet flavors kick then in to bring a deliciously fresh side to the after-taste. This is a superb dry Riesling! 2014-2026."

92 David Schildknecht - Robert Parker's Wine Advocate

"A greenhouse- or florist's-like amalgam of leafing and flowering things joins with intimations of alkalinity and wet stone in the nose of Immich-Batterieberg's 2011 Enkircher Batterieberg Riesling. Its juicy lemon and lime brightness enlivens a complex matrix of white peach, apricot and crabapple suffused with fruit pit, diverse flower petals, crushed stone, mustard seed and freshly-milled grain on a subtly satiny palate. This finishes with lift and shimmeringly interactive intensity of floral, herbal, fruit and mineral components. I would expect it to perform well for at least 15 years."

"Gernot Kollmann picked most of his best parcels in the third week of October, although botrytis pressure forced him to attack some vines earlier. Even with such a relatively late harvest and a vintage this ripe, he has been able to bottle wines with finished alcohol between 12-12.5%, in keeping with a continued goal of achieving levity. Vine age, genetic diversity, and lack of grafts have much to do, in Kollmann's (and many another Mosel vintner's) view, with their fruit ripening at relatively low must weights. These wines display the sort of balance that long-time (and last family) proprietor Georg Immich adored, although I regret that one certainly cannot credit as prophetic his belief that halbtrocken would, before the last century was out, become the sensible and aesthetically sensitive norm among "dry" German Rieslings! (Perhaps one day still, though.) He has managed to secure significant numbers of wholesome used barrels of 300-liter capacity, substituting these increasingly for classic 225-liter barriques; but reports that, sadly, he cannot locate suitable used 500- or 600-liter demi-muids nor, for the time being, afford to introduce newly constructed fuders on the classic Mosel model. (For more on the recent evolution - indeed, veritable resurrection - of this venerable estate, please consult my reports in issues 199 and 192. The first, strikingly delicious Chardonnay-dominated wine has appeared from Weingut Rinke's dramatically-steep and -restored mussel-chalk terraces on the Upper Mosel, a Kollmann project about which I'll write further in future, though that arguably belongs in the context of covering neighboring Luxemburg, or even Champagne.)"