Winemaker Notes
Century-old, pre-phylloxera, ungrafted vines planted on a blue slate hillside of dizzying steepness renders a wine that’s nothing short of profound. It offers intense flavor, integrated juiciness, sensuous texture and extraordinary length and intricacy with guaranteed potential for long maturation.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Such an enticing nose of dried and fresh flowers, under-laid by a slew of stone-fruit and passion-fruit aromas. All this is completely reflected on the juicy and vibrant palate that has tremendous finesse. Super-long and filigree finish! From very old non-grafted vines on blue slate.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
From ancient, partly ungrafted vines, the 2020 Enkircher Ellergrub Riesling is white-golden in color and opens with a clear, fine and very complex as well as delicate bouquet of ripe fruit and finely weathered blue slate notes. This is amazingly fine again but also generously ripe, yet everything seems to be so easily interwoven. Bottled three weeks ago, this is a full-bodied, round and elegant Riesling that, again, didn't ferment to fully dry, which gives slightly sweet (or round) fruit but also lush, mouth-filling and silky-textured fruit with remarkable finesse. The finish is long and harmonious, very elegant and sublime. Many Riesling lovers will adore this wine immediately (and with the right dish, such as poultry in cream sauce with morels or porcini, with good reason), yet I'd opt to cellar it for about a decade. In any case, you can expect to enjoy a great Mosel Riesling when it's Immich's 2020 Ellergrub
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.