Winemaker Notes
On the nose, fresh and minerally with floral aromas and flavors. On the palate, very juicy, racy, and precise. Pair with Asian dishes or cheese and desserts.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Generous pear fruit and substance for a Kabinett, but they're married to bright, citrusy acidity that makes this uplifting and appealing. Just beginning to show its considerable finesse. Drink or hold
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Graacher Himmelreich Kabinett is bright, precise and floral on the slightly flinty, very elegant and finessed nose with crunchy slate aromas. Piquant and fresh on the filigreed and crystalline palate, this is a lush and tropical-flavored, buoyant and frisky Himmelreich with juicy apricot and white peach aromas and the fine grip pf broken slate. The finish is straight, piquant, well structured, stimulatingly fresh and salty. This is a gorgeous 2018 that tastes almost dry in the end. Tasted at the domain in September 2020.
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Wine Enthusiast
Succulent flavors of pineapple, lemon and mango dance and dart on the palate of this spry little Kabinett. It's an intensely fruity, juicy sip but anchored by a reverberating backbone of acidity and lingering notes of earth, smoke, spice and animal. Delightful already, but there's so much potential for cellaring, too.
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Wine Spectator
A beautiful kabinett, featuring notes of white raspberry and apricot, underscored by electric acidity and minerality, creating harmony and imparting energy and length. Light yet expressive, with a solid structure. Spice notes emerge on the finish. Best from 2021 through 2033.
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.