This page lists reviews of wines from the above price range.
Markus Schneider, an up-and-coming wine maker from the Palatinate, seems to like very simple, clean labels - a no-nonsense approach that has nothing of the sometimes overly decorated, old-fashioned German wine labels.
This wine is an impostor! While it is a rosé made of Pinot Noir grapes, it is so pale in colour and so light and fresh on the tongue that you could almost confuse it with a white wine. Expect an easy to drink and very enjoyable rosé with fresh acid (apple and citrus fruit) that has just a hint of vegetable and roughness to it. Very enjoyable.
This is one of several wines we bought during our 2008 Mosel tour. Clemens Busch was the last winery we visited on a busy day of tasting wine and despite a certain exhaustion we were very impressed with the dry Rieslings, a style many people might not expect from the Mosel. So how does the wine taste when taken out of the winery's tasting room?
Straw-coloured. Fairly understated smell of candied citrus peel, camomile tea and a hint of petrol.
The taste is so much fresher and more open: Wonderful rich sweetness, elegant ripe pineapple notes, the world's fruitiest camomile tea, the tiniest hint of caramel, good stable acidity, a mineral background. What makes this Spätlese wonderful is that it has the complex flavours of maturity (the typical lemon, peach and apricot aroma of young riesling is almost completely gone), but is still vibrant and fresh. It seems that, out of pure luck, I have opened it at a very good point in its development.
From a region not often talked about, a producer to watch out for.
No one in their right mind would open a 14.5 % wine on a hot summer evening, I know, but we had a chicken in a wonderful creamy tarragon sauce to take care of, we needed a heavy hitter, so I took a desperate gamble. It was a crazy plan, but it might just have worked...
In the nose, classic pinot blanc: honeydew melon, salted almonds, biscuit, a hint of dried herbs. In the mouth, think - and I've had time to think, tasting this on the second day - think melon again, artichokes, aloe skin cream. Now coat this mixture in white chocolate with salted pistachio pieces, and you have it - it's a meal, really.
From the Loire valley comes this nicely named Cabernet Franc ("Day of thirst").
Nice colour for a start: dense, purple-tinged red. Nice smell, too: Sour cherries, some cassis. Bone dry, fresh, pure fruit in the mouth, reminds me of a lighter Bordeaux, but with none of the unpleasant greenness you can get there. This is fresh and nicely rustic, but ripe and with harmonic tannin. Two things I particularly like about this wine: No oak at all, and a kind of vegetable earthiness, like tasting a spade you've used to dig up vegetables.
Original, yet very easy to drink, this is a rare thing: a terroir summer wine. To me, this says "grilled vegetables" all over. Nicely chilled, I would even give it a go with grilled fish.
This Riesling from yet another Mosel tributary, the Saar, has a very understated smell, in fact, apart from a little ripe grape and mineral hints, it has little smell at all.
The taste is all ripe fruit as well, "yellow" taste, sweet ripe grapes again, dried herbs, some honey, fairly concentrated. This is a very ripe and smooth style of Riesling, very well made I'm sure, and great for people who can't have too much acidity, but frankly, I was looking for something a bit livelier, and this seems prematurely aged somehow.
This is not a summer wine. Very likely the "boring"-ranking will seem very unfair once I've tried the second bottle of this on some chilly october day. But right now, it didn't work for me.
From Baden's interesting, but little known sub-region of Markgräflerland,an area between Freiburg and Basel, named after the ancestral territory of the margraves of Baden, comes another unexpectedly serious, yet fairly priced Pinot Noir:
Surprisingly dark and dense cherry red.
Concentrated smell of earthy cherries, a few plums and leafy forest floor. Very very promising.
Looks quite fizzy, lots of small bubbles, greenish colour. Fresh in the nose. Everything about this wine is very fruity at first, almost like an exotic fruit explosion. Also, it seemed to me somewhat unbalanced at first, going through various stages in a short time, sometimes emphasizing fresh lemony acidity, a little mineral, then suddenly grapefruit.
However, after two hours or so, everything settles down, the mineral gets stronger, the rest of the flavours order themselves around it and a nice and orderly German fashion.
Still very young, but quite nice after two+ hours with air. Especially for the price!
If to me some of the recent 2006 wines were like an acid handgranade, this Riesling here is the 80mm shell. Dry, edgy, green apple with a hint of nut. And a clearly defined core of steely acidity with just enough fruit flavours decorated around it to give you a proper punch.
