2016 Maximin Grunhauser Abtsberg Spatlese
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Tasting notes
The 2016 Maximin Grünhaus Abtsberg Riesling Spätlese shows a pure, reductive and extremely flinty/crunchy bouquet with perfectly ripe but still crisp and healthy fruit. Lush, round and very elegant on the palate, this is a piquant, beautifully balanced and refined Spätlese with grace and finesse. A fabulous wine! Tasted March 2018.
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Julia Harding MW, jancisrobinson.com
Stephan Reinhardt, Wine Advocate
More reviews and scores
The white peach, pear and white currant on display here offered a jellied impression of ripeness, sweetness and concentration such as I would have anticipated from an Auslese. The nose is effusive and the palate luscious, creamy and glycerol-rich yet delicate and shot through with enlivening fresh lime. As with a number of Grünhaus 2016s, there is an appealingly cooling aspect to this wine’s green herbal accents, while peach kernel and walnut offer piquant counterpoint to the wine’s overt sweetness and luscious fruitiness. In a surprising role reversal, this Abtsberg delivers the sort of vividly tactile sense of smoky and crystalline stony mineral impingement and vibrant sense of dynamic flavor interplay that I typically associate with Herrenberg. (There is no separate auction lot of Abtsberg Spätlese from vintage 2016.)
Creamy orange and rocky lemon aroma and flavour with depth in texture as well as flavour. Plus an attractive dusty quality. Juicy in its sweet orangey/lemon intensity. Long and GV . Moreishly mouth-watering. Intense apricot sweetness on the palate, generous and taut at the same time. Mouth-watering and much more to come from the apparently – for now – simple sweet/fresh harmony. (JH)