Winemaker Notes
This Estate Riesling is made in a slightly off-dry style that perfectly balances Mosel Riesling's typically crisp acidity.
This makes it a very refreshing choice to serve as an aperitif, as a partner for lighter dishes or with reception appetizers.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Did you say pasta carbonara? Where is the tomato salad? This riesling is such a joyful wine with a ton of white peaches and a dry enough balance. Such a refreshing finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Riesling is pure, bright and crystal-clear on the precise, floral and finessed nose. Round and juicy on the palate, this is a very delicate and stimulating Riesling in the off-dry style. The wine has enormous grip, and you won't stop longing for it. Absolutely fabulous! 11% alcohol. Tasted from AP 1 20 in April 2020.
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Wine & Spirits
Oliver Haag’s estate riesling offers a lot of wine for $20. It’s rich in texture and dense in savory flavor, with notes of walnut, green pear and wet slate. Floral scents come up with air, in the mode of white peach, but the overall impression is umami, broad and deep enough to pair with fish or veal in a cream sauce.
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Wine Enthusiast
Haag’s value entry-level Riesling shares the same smoky, seductive spice and earth tones of the producer’s more expensive single-vineyard bottlings, but with an immediately approachable fruitiness and zeal. Just a shade off-dry, it’s packed with thirst-quenching white grapefruit and peachy goodness anchored by a firm, mineral undertone. Best now–2023.
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.