2017 Dönnhoff Hermannshöhle Riesling Grosses Gewächs

Dönnhoff

Germany / Nahe / Dönnhoff

A perfect, steep southern slope with soils consisting of blackish grey slate and volcanic elements, extremely rich in minerals. This legendary site is the best-rated vineyard in the entire Nahe region. The vines are up to 60 years old and give yields of about 40hl/ha. 100% selective hand harvest. The must is fermented and the wine matured in stainless steel vats and classic oak barrels. A very complex Riesling of noble elegance with a hugely intense, rich fullness of flavour and deep mineral tones. A great dry wine with a mysterious, aristocratic character.

September, 2018

Stuart Pigott

jamessuckling.com

98 points

This defines high elegance. Everything you look for in a dry white wine with very fine aromas of white and yellow peaches, but also a thousand wild herbs and flowers. Enormous delicacy at the very long finish. From organically grown grapes. Fair'n Green certification. Drink or hold.

April, 2019

David Schildknecht

Vinous Media

95 points

Thyme, marjoram, black tea, apple wood and pronounced pit-inflected white peach serve for pungent, smoky intrigue. As the wine takes on air, gentian adds a hauntingly bitter-sweet fragrance. The palate displays an improbably combination of richness, fleshiness and expansiveness with transparency to intricate herbal and diversely mineral impingements as well as conveying something I can only call poise. There is just enough succulence of white peach and brightness of lime to lend luscious appeal and animation while conveying a certain sense of restraint. The prodigious finishing flavors spread like a billowing carpet of herbs and bittersweet-perfume flowers strewn with stony crystals and saliva-inducing grains of mineral salts. This is not a powerful wine; but it is one that makes a powerful and profound statement and lucidly testifies to a great site. Incidentally, there are now typically four Stückfässer of this for a total volume of nearly 5,000 liters, far more than of any other Dönnhoff Grosse Gewächse.

Standard Bottle Out of Stock

About Dönnhoff

Helmut Dönnhoff and son Cornelius make the best wines in the Nahe region and some of the finest anywhere in the world. We can't possibly overstate how much we cherish and revere these wines. They are sheer perfection in their elegantly defined structure and flawless harmony. The epitome of their meticulous winemaking is the Eiswein. Dönnhoff wines have such power and complexity that their signature weightlessness seems nigh on miraculous. One taste and you sense the magic. These wines are on a par with the best of Germany in a very unique way: the sweet wines rival those of Prüm, Loosen and Egon Müller and the dry wines are mentioned in the same breath as luminaries such as Wittmann and Weil. Very few - if any - have this degree of versatility...

About

Cornelius Dönnhoff bears with him the promise and burden of great expectations. Dönnhoff’'s world-renowned Rieslings were first carried into the international limelight by his father, but now it is the son assuming an increasing share of the responsibility for the estate in the small town of Oberhausen on the Nahe (population 400). “No one knows the Nahe, but everyone knows Dönnhoff,” they say in the USA. And with the recent conclusion of his seventh vintage, this young, university-trained viticulturalist has every reason to smile. He won three consecutive Feinschmecker Cups for his dry Riesling collection, and in 2012 the simultaneous distinction of both “Estate of the Year” and “Best White Wine Collection” from the renowned Eichelmann wine guide. In 2014 Stuart Pigott named him Winemaker of the Year in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Cornelius acquired his initial winemaking experience at his parents' estate, followed by an apprenticeship at the Dr. Heger wine estate in Ihringen. University studies in viticultural techniques in Bad Kreuznach came next, followed by time abroad in New Zealand and Australia. In 2007 he assumed the role of cellarmaster at Dönnhoff and currently runs the estate together with his father.