Winemaker Notes
The wine shows a ripe and aromatic nose of pineapple, almond, pear, Mirabelle, some buttery elements and honeyed yellow fruits. It proves delicately fruity and creamy on the juicy yet fresh and citrus-driven palate with a finish which is nicely aromatic and full of presence.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Intense rhubarb nose that makes it stand out in this category. Sleek, tense and powerful with a lot of drive. Built for the long-term and still slightly edgy right now. Drinkable now, but best from 2023.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Karthäuserhofberg GG offers an intensely aromatic, botrytis-scented bouquet of super ripe fruits, but it's pretty loud at this stage. Mouth-filling, rich and also racy on the palate, this is a full-bodied and quite powerful wine that appears like a fist in the mouth. The finish is salty and intense and significantly more finessed from a Burgundy glass. All in all, it's a rather indifferent performance today compared to my tasting a year ago.
Rating: 90+
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.