Winemaker Notes
Fabulous with fish and seafood. Great with poultry and any kind of spicy dishes.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Berncasteler Doctor Riesling Kabinett is clear, bright, fresh and still reductive on the flinty, coolish-crunchy nose that evokes crushed rocks. Silky textured and highly elegant, this is a gorgeously lush and finessed Doctor Kabinett with a long, salty and stimulatingly piquant but beautifully balanced finish. This is a noble Riesling with clear fruit and terroir expression. The sweetness is discreet, but the fruit is piquant and salty, the structure highly finessed and the whole architecture crystalline like a Gothic chapel. Highly recommended! Tasted from AP 2 18.
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Wine Enthusiast
Pristine, sun-kissed white peach and grapefruit flavors are jolted by lightening strikes of lemon and lime in this irresistibly lip-smacking wine. It's intensely juicy and concentrated yet breathless and weightless on the palate. A gorgeous wine already that should improve through 2027.
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.