The 2016 Gottesfuss Riesling Alte Reben has a lovely flinty/reductive, refined, pretty stony and initially slightly yeasty bouquet. Lush and elegant, this is a super fine but also super complex and persistent Riesling from roughly 120-years old vines. The finish is enormous, very long and complex but still reductive and very tight, with crunchy fresh slate flavors. The wine tastes pretty dry due to its strong minerality and grip. It's pure and rather filigreed but develops stunning volume and remarkable length. Tasted March 2018.

The 2015 Saar Riesling (Wiltinger) Gottesfuss Alte Reben is super pure, fresh and flinty on the nose, but also very fine in its perfectly ripe and concentrated Riesling flavors. Full-bodied, dense and rich, this is a very intense and concentrated Gottesfuss with a lot of power in the finish, but also a crystalline elegance and finesse. I suppose this wine has an excellent aging potential, but it still needs to reduce its power.

The 2014 Gottesfuss Alte Reben displays a deep and intense, pure and well concentrated bouquet of ripe Riesling. Full-bodied, very elegant and rich on the palate, this is a pure and powerful, very well structured and expressive Riesling that reveals a great length but is pure and finesse-full. The new oak fuder adds a certain creaminess and tannin structure. This is doubtlessly the greatest wine produced here in 2014, although I haven't yet tasted the Auslese and Beerenauslese yet that were still fermenting.

Fresh lemon, flinty slate and lovely herbal aromas are displayed on the clear, rather coolish and elegant nose of the 2012 Riesling Alte Reben Wiltinger Gottesfuss, which reveals ripe peach aromas. Very clear and elegant on the full-bodied palate this rich, intense and well-balanced wine has a firm and elegant structure as well as a piquant and stimulatingly salty finish. Keep for at least four years!

A haunting nose of yellow plum, saffron, fennel, kelp, and sea breeze in the nose of Niewodniczanski’s centenarian-vines 2011 Wiltinger Gottesfuss Riesling Alte Reben leads to correspondingly intriguing and satin-textured as well as pithily concentrated and gloriously juicy palate impression, with a complex amalgamation of high-toned green herbal essences; crushed stone; and savory, saline-sweet fresh scallop and toasted shrimp shell. The finish here is superbly sustained and dynamically multi-faceted. I’m put in mind of marriage between a top-notch Chablis Preuses and a Scharzhofberger. This already memorable tribute to vines that are a national treasure ought to be worth following through at least 2022, and hopefully (as the track record here catches up with recent refinements of technique) significantly beyond. And incidentally, it had been in bottle for just two weeks when I tasted it, but – unlike many van Volxem 2010s at the same stage – seemingly entirely unperturbed. Dominik Volk reports that the van Volxem team did not begin harvesting until after things cooled down – specifically on October 4 with a pre-harvest sweep of all sites – and then spent five and a half weeks completing their work under allegedly ideal meteorological circumstances. “It was very difficult to strike the right balance this year,” he opines, since – as I detailed, among other places, in my introduction to notes on the Middle Mosel 2011s – this vintage’s Rieslings, due in large part to their low acidities, were highly sensitive to residual sugar; yet high must weights also brought the danger of excessive alcohol. In the event, Volk and Niewodniczanski elected to risk erring on the side of alcohol, and finished a higher than usual percentage of their Rieslings legally dry (though following their now long-standing convention, none are labeled “trocken”). It paid off with a high rate of expressive successes, which is especially good news because this vintage rewarded Niewodniczanski with his largest-ever crop – not that yields came within hailing distance of the averages at 98% of other German Riesling addresses. In addition to the wines on which I report here, a B.A. and a T.B.A. from the Scharzhofberger which I have not tasted were still fermenting as of last autumn. (For much more about Roman Niewodniczanski’s highly distinctive, evolving methodology and his stylistic ideals, consult the often extensive introductions to my reports on his previous collections.) Importers include Ewald Moseler Selections, Portland OR; tel. (888) 274-4312 and Acid Inc. Selections, New York, NY; tel. (817) 687-4848