Keller Limestone Riesling 2020
his bright green-gold just off-dry Riesling has a delicate, irresistible nose, with passion fruit, white flowers, honeyed citrus, and dried honey moving in and out of the foreground, alternating with white peaches, pink grapefruit, lemon zest, and a fleeting suggestion of sweet wood smoke as the nose evolves in the glass.
On the palate, the wine is a juicy explosion, shimmering with voltaic tension between delicate sweetness and electrifying apple and lime citric acidity. But you never notice sweetness or acidity separately. Pure green apple, white cranberry, tangerine, and stone fruit flavors, all seasoned with palpable saline minerality, lead to a long emphatic finish, with plenty of fresh acidity, depth, and cut. John Gilman, arguably the world’s foremost critic of German wine, called it “succulent and flat out delicious.”
About this wine producer: Klaus-Peter Keller has inspired a renaissance of viniculture in the Hügelland, where the Benedictines of the Kloster Lorch grew some of the most prestigious wines in the Rheinland, in vineyards that were forgotten after the French Revolution. His stunning dry Rieslings have been called “the German Montrachets” by Jancis Robinson, MW, the brilliant editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine. But his noble sweet wines are no less well received. In fact, Keller has won the Gault Millau “Best of Germany” award in both categories. “If I had to name the best producer in Germany today, it would be Klaus‐Peter Keller, wrote Steven Tanzer, the world’s stingiest wine critic. “Everything he touches turns to gold.” Though lionized by the journalists as the greatest winegrower of his generation, Klaus-Peter is quick to point out that “great wine would not be possible here, if it weren’t for these great limestone soils. It’s only that someone had to remember the old tradition and just make good wine.”
