Winemaker Notes
This Riesling is rich in taste with a fresh, fruity delicate flavor.
Serve slightly chilled.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Super elegant and super filigreed, with ravishing aromas of honeysuckle, white peaches and Asian pears, this is a very sophisticated and polished wine for this category. Incredibly refreshing, but also incredibly silky on the light-bodied palate. Then comes the extremely long and precise finish in which floral and wet-stone elements are almost perfectly interwoven.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Kabinett is deep, pure, fresh and slatey on the precise, coolish and also floral nose. Mouth-filling, rich and dense on the palate, this is a round and juicy, very mineral, stimulating, savory and saline wine with fine, stimulating grip and an aromatic, well-structured and relatively dry finish. This is excellent and stylish in its terroir expression.
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Vinous
The 2023 Riesling Wehlener Sonnenuhr Kabinett opens with some reduction, but the yeastiness blends with lemon. The palate is sleek and contoured, vividly fine, with cool, salty slate. Its blue, cool aspect shines with yellow lemon, creating a gorgeous complementary accord that accentuates absolute elegance.
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Wine Spectator
A full, seductive kabinett, offering ripe apple and peach flavors that show real delicacy. Fluid and streaming through the well-meshed finish, which features bitter herb, earth and jasmine notes, with loads of chalky mineral and salty, wet slate elements, plus a hint of waxy honey. Drink now through 2040. 340 cases imported.
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.