Winemaker Notes
100% Pinot Noir (Spätburgunder) from the Dhron Hofberg vineyard in the Mosel.This refreshing, slate grown Rosé is fermented naturally in stainless steel,maintaining a bright and zippy character without high alcohol levels.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Sourced from the same part of the vineyard as the Hofberg Kabinett and picked on September 8 at 86° Oechsle, the 2018 Spätburgunder Rosé offers a delicately fruity, Riesling-like bouquet with fine slate and red berry aromas. Lush and round on the palate, this is a delicious, beautifully fruity and refined rosé that tastes perfectly round as well as piquant and finishes like a fruity Riesling Spätlese. Don't get me wrong: This is a Pinot Noir, but I take it as a Mosel wine and don't care about Burgundy, where this filigreed lightness and crystalline, piquant and airy style could never be produced. Drink this beauty as a pink Riesling, and you'll be in heaven. Drink it young, though, because I don't know if it can get any better with bottle age.
Whether it’s playful and fun or savory and serious, most rosé today is not your grandmother’s White Zinfandel, though that category remains strong. Pink wine has recently become quite trendy, and this time around it’s commonly quite dry. Since the pigment in red wines comes from keeping fermenting juice in contact with the grape skins for an extended period, it follows that a pink wine can be made using just a brief period of skin contact—usually just a couple of days. The resulting color depends on grape variety and winemaking style, ranging from pale salmon to deep magenta.
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.