2016 Graacher Domprobst Spatlese WK

From deeper slate soils that deliver very aromatic fruit and crunchy slate aromas, the 2016 Riesling Graacher Domprobst Spätlese (White Capsule) is excitingly pure and smoky on the terribly fine and dark nose. This is intense, piquant and very complex on the palate but also beautifully fruity, lush and crystalline in its super fine and silky texture.The finish is pure, salty and perfectly interwoven with ripe and elegant fruit. This is a great Mosel wine from 2016, and it sells for 20 euros ex cellar. Tasted March 2018.

Here is another of those gorgeously heady, florally perfumed noses that seem to abound among Molitor 2016s. Lily, rowan and heliotrope garland ripe apple and pecan, themes perfectly suited to this wine’s subtly creamy, expansive yet alcoholically buoyant palate impression. And for all of that creamy, nutty richness, the billowingly sustained finish is a model of sheer refreshment as well as of transparency to crystalline and stony nuances.

This immediately catches one’s attention with an absolutely gorgeous and refined nose made of dried flowers, smoke, vineyard peach, pear, cassis, mint and almond. The wine is beautifully complex but delivers this with purity, finesse and lightness on the palate. There is enough dry extract to give the wine great structure and yet, at the same time, the finish is all about freshness and lightness as one is just left with flowers, smoke and almond in the after-taste. This beautiful dry Riesling is simply breathtakingly good. Oct 2017, www.moselfinewines.com, Drink: 2021-2036