Winemaker Notes
Delicately flowery and spicy nose of herbs, spices, and pear. Zesty on the light palate. with a bone-dry feel to the long finish.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This feather-light dry Riesling announces itself with peels of white flower, tea leaf and honeydew perfume. Delightfully fragrant and transcendent in fruit quality, it's a sleek, zippy sip with a dazzling mineral finish. It's such a youthful, pretty wine now, it's hard not to drink immediately but should maintain peak well through 2026.
Editors' Choice -
James Suckling
Very effusive nose of white peaches, lemon zest and fresh herbs. This sleek, spritzy and effusive dry riesling manages simultaneously to be light on its feet and have good depth. Zesty and mineral finish. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The selection even for the dry entry cuvée was very strict, and so opens the new Gutswein of the domain, the 2019 Riesling trocken Schieferkristall, with a delicate yet dense apricot aroma and a polished slate tone. Pure, fresh and vital on the palate, this is a substantial, tightly structured yet juicy and persistently aromatic Ruwer Kabinett (though it is not declared as such for ask-the-VDP reasons) with tension and a stimulatingly salty finish. More serious, complex and structured compared to Bruno, so rather another style than quality.
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.