2016 Piesporter Goldtropchen

The 2016 Piesporter Goldtröpfchen Riesling Trocken displays a beautifully clear, elegant and complex bouquet of ripe, elegant fruit aromas intertwined with fine and flinty slate notes. Full-bodied, intense and long on the palate, this is an elegant, complex, silky textured dry Riesling with impressive fruit intensity and firm yet fine and persistent structure. A great Goldtröpfchen indeed. Tasted April 2018.

From the same more-than-100-year-old vines that have informed the last two such bottlings, this year’s Goldtröpfchen sans Prädikat is not only (like last year’s) dry, but it’s dry to the extent of harboring just two grams per liter of residual sugar. Like the corresponding “village-level” offering, this is strikingly dominated on nose and palate by stone, ash, smoke and marine salinity. To be sure, site-typical citrus and cassis notes emerge as well. But the concentrated, glossy palate reminds me in its mineral and animal dimensions of fish oils. As with so many of the best dry 2016s, this somehow combines a formidable sense of stuffing with alcoholic levity (even though it reached 12%). Citrus seed and nut piquancy adds stimulation to a seriously sustained finish featuring myriad, undulating layers of flavor in a fruit-and-mineral bath.