Winemaker Notes
Great solo or paired with Asian cuisine.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This wonderful Mosel Kabinett has a wide spectrum of white tree fruit, wild berry and herb aromas. Impressive concentration on the very focused light-bodied palate. I love the racy acidity and pronounced slatey minerality that is wrapped around the very long and clean finish. Drink or hold.
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Decanter
Cooler in tone than the more sun-kissed Wehlener Sonnenuhr, this delightfully stony, crystalline wine highlights the Mosel's mineral intensity. Light as a feather yet bracing with lemon-lime acidity, the palate highlights ripe but pristine flavours of green apple skins, fresh celery and yellow plums. Just a hint off-dry and kissed with flint, it's a revitalizing, spry wine that's welcoming young but cellarworthy too.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Graacher Himmelreich Kabinett is quite reductive on the clear and quite intense flinty nose that indicates ripe and concentrated fruit with a spicy-phenolic touch. The wine is dense and pretty tight and provided with fine tannins and stimulating salinity. The 2022 is a vintage that needs a certain bottle age to gain in finesse. 9% stated alcohol. Natural cork.
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Wine Spectator
A distinctive version with depth, offering a mix of apple, guava and juicy nectarine flavors, plus hints of ground ginger and cinnamon. More savory than most kabinette, this shows a subtle earthy edge. A kick of bitter pithiness adds to the balance and tension, while an herb oil accent lines the long, mineral-rich finish. Drink now through 2035. 180 cases imported.
Riesling possesses a remarkable ability to reflect the character of wherever it is grown while still maintaining its identity. A regal variety of incredible purity and precision, this versatile grape can be just as enjoyable dry or sweet, young or old, still or sparkling and can age longer than nearly any other white variety. Somm Secret—Given how difficult it is to discern the level of sweetness in a Riesling from the label, here are some clues to find the dry ones. First, look for the world “trocken.” (“Halbtrocken” or “feinherb” mean off-dry.) Also a higher abv usually indicates a drier Riesling.
Following the Mosel River as it slithers and weaves dramatically through the Eifel Mountains in Germany’s far west, the Mosel wine region is considered by many as the source of the world’s finest and longest-lived Rieslings.
Mosel’s unique and unsurpassed combination of geography, geology and climate all combine together to make this true. Many of the Mosel’s best vineyard sites are on the steep south or southwest facing slopes, where vines receive up to ten times more sunlight, a very desirable condition in this cold climate region. Given how many twists and turns the Mosel River makes, it is not had to find a vineyard with this exposure. In fact, the Mosel’s breathtakingly steep slopes of rocky, slate-based soils straddle the riverbanks along its entire length. These rocky slate soils, as well as the river, retain and reflect heat back to the vineyards, a phenomenon that aids in the complete ripening of its grapes.
Riesling is by far the most important and prestigious grape of the Mosel, grown on approximately 60% of the region’s vineyard land—typically on the desirable sites that provide the best combination of sunlight, soil type and altitude. The best Mosel Rieslings—dry or sweet—express marked acidity, low alcohol, great purity and intensity with aromas and flavors of wet slate, citrus and stone fruit. With age, the wine’s color will become more golden and pleasing aromas of honey, dried apricot and sometimes petrol develop.
Other varieties planted in the Mosel include Müller-Thurgau, Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir) and Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc), all performing quite well here.