Winemaker Notes
A top value wine, this Riesling has notes of refreshing minty herbal fruit. Highly complex there are also notes of minerality including slate and flintstone.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Very steep, slate soils and a gently reductive edge with flinty aromas, some wild herbs and some dried flowers. The palate is sleek, very restrained and dialed-in with plenty of spice and discrete grapefruit. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Bockenauer Riesling trocken Schiefergestein offers a thrilling and utterly pure, fine and mineral as well as floral and transcendent bouquet of crushed slate and even ashes intermixed with highly ripe and concentrated Riesling berry and fresh pineapple aromas that reflect the warm vintage. Filigreed or fine-boned on the palate, this is a fine and crystalline, persistently salty and vivacious dry Riesling with great mineral tension, finesse and elegance. A fabulous wine that is already on the level of a cru, it's one of the most attractive wines in the portfolio of Schäfer-Fröhlich, and it's hard to find a wine of similar complexity at this price point. This 2018 is tight but refined, ripe but pure and fresh and of tantalizing elegance. Enormously salty and mouth-titillating. Order as much as you can get and be prepared to be thrilled.
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Wine Enthusiast
Harvested a week earlier than GG wines and from younger vines on the Felseneck vineyard, the Schiefergestein is a more approachable, fresh-fruited expression of this producer's steely, mineral-focused style. Dry and refreshingly brisk, it offers sunny, pristine grapefruit and honeydew flavors catapulted by racy lime acidity and hints of cut slate. Ready to drink now but should hold through 2028.
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.
