Community Tasting Notes (46) Avg Score: 93.3 points

  • Rating: 4,2/5,0.

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  • No detailed TN. Quite sweet and almost luscious, fruit has mostly evolved into tertiary flavors, a bit of botrytis and a bit of aged Riesling, this was rather nice to end the night.

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  • Part of an all-Riesling magnum night at Chinese restaurant with my wine group. The other being the 2014 Domaine Weinbach Riesling Schlossberg Cuvee Sainte Catherine. The Donnhoff was off-dry, maybe even sweet. It went very well with the spices in the food and especially well with the duck that we all had. The color was a little darker than I had remembered from a previous bottle (years ago), the finish was long, and we all loved this!

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  • Sweet but fresh and balanced, and exactly what I was hoping for from this half-bottle. Nice acidity (on day 1) athough this waned after 1.5 weeks in the fridge. Honey, pineapple and caramel notes, as well as additional tropical fruits.

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  • Fresh and elegant, super easy drinking and displayed all the classic Riesling characters (no petrol) which was great.

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  • Golden color, nose with dried apricot, black tea, spices and lemon peel. Palate is fresh, lush and sweet, but in no way gluey. Elegant wine, needs no pairing. Stunning beauty with years to go.

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  • Liquid apricot with honey and richness

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  • Seems very complex, just opened and already developing minute by minute into some new phase. Luscious tropical fruits in the background. Interesting elements more on the palette. Noticed cloves on the nose.
    *4th night. Grapefruit, caraway and celery on the nose. Beautiful, expressive with a lot going on.

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  • 93+

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  • Magnificent 6 Ride Again: Lemon, apple, pear and passionfruit. Rich flavour, good acid that cuts through well. Good length and balance here, a really nice drink.

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  • From 375. Honeyed color. Honey and petrol on the nose. Plenty of petrol on the palate as well, a soupçon on botrytis, lemon peel, and honeyed golden apple/apricot. Sweetness is pleasantly moderate for GKA, with a tinge of caramel. Could use a touch more acid, and not as much complexity as I was hoping for... tastes older than it is, especially compared to the last auslese I drank, a ‘97 Zilliken Saarsburger Rausch. Nice but not exceptional.

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  • From 375ml bottle acquired on release. Absolutely delicious wine of elegance and intensity...so many layers of subtle elements going on it is almost hard to describe. Sweet but not cloyingly so. Stern with bright, intense acidity. It just cut through my wife’s caramel cheesecake like a hot knife through butter. Minerally, savory (light herbs and tea) and full of ripe stone fruit especially apricot. Perfectly balanced. Another stunning bottle of this wine that should have a very long life ahead with the potential for further positive development.

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  • From 375ml bottle, pulled and not decanted to have with apple bread pudding brought by a friend for dessert. Notes taken with a taste of some left overnight. Bright medium golden yellow color. Nose has beeswax, honey, minerals, apricot and stewed apple. Stunningly intense bouquet. Moderate acidity and sweetness that seems just perfectly balanced. If the nose had more apricot the palate is a bit more even between the apple and apricot. Stupendously good with the bread pudding. This has a long life ahead especially in larger bottles and with a decant to get it some air before drinking.

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  • Liquid apricot with great acidity and balance

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  • Rich with sweet apricot and honey

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  • Perfection.

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  • From 375mL bottle. Wow this was like drinking crystallised diamonds. Very complex nose of many things too hard to put into words here but cinnamon, spice, honey and waffles come to mind with a scintillating slaty minerality. The palate has great intensity and tension with an ethereal lightness of touch with a finish that keeps going on and on. Everything is exceptionally well balanced and doesn't get too top heavy or cloying. The last glass did have a few crystals in it from precipitated acid so I would suggest decanting before you drink as this did seem to reduce the purity of the wine. Greatness here.

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  • Apricot, honey and pears with acidity and crispness

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  • Tasted blind. Notes of petrol and yellow peaches. Feels mature, medium sweetness, notes of mango. Felt older than its age but very good.

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  • Delicious with apricot, peach, honey and asian pear on the finish

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  • Rich, sweet and honey with apricot and pear

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  • Almost sauternes-like on the nose, maybe not surprising as 2006 is supposedly one of the better botrytis years in Germany over the past couple of decades. Rich and lush, as expected, with a fair amount of density and viscosity, good intensity of flavor, with honeyed baked peach, hints of dried apricot and pineapple, a subtle saline quality, moderate but adequate acidity, fairly lengthy finish.

    I was lucky enough to taste through the entire 2006 lineup with Helmut Donnhoff in May, 2007. Of all the Auslesen (Brucke, Hermannshohle, Felsenberg, Kupfergrube), the Brucke was far and away the most interesting and balanced. Perhaps it is simply too early to be trying one now, but the youthful zing is muted, and the flavors are a bit lackluster in comparison to what it was early on. I'm more an more convinced that the best time to drink sweet German wines is when they are still young and zippy. I've had enough with age to know what they can become, but I think that's a rarity, more than the norm.

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  • Papaya spear, petrol, white tea, peach pit and a little cayenne pepper. Driven and longer than anything by Wagner and just as full and entertaining. There's crisp acidity and everything falls into a harmonious exhibition. Drink now -.

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  • Honey, pineapple and great balance with lovely color, nose and balance

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  • Honeyed with floral notes and rich sweetness but not cloying or syrupy

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  • Sweet with enough acidity to stay away from cloying. Lots of tropical fruit and honey with nice finish

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  • Lots of honey, peach, pineapple and bit of vanilla. Nice for dessert and will be very long lived. Good body and nice acidity.

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  • Same quality and acidity as previous tastings. Fruitiness abounds. Less petroleum smell and taste initially. This is just solid and like a good german car, it starts everytime and tastes great every time. The girls love it

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  • At Otto e Mezzo in HK with Paul and George. Very strong smell of petroleum and plastic initially. Over time hints of minerality and apples come . Nice fruit and acidity without the weight and sometimes over sweetness of a sauternes. Loving this wine.

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  • Good now but will be awesome in the future. This wine needs time!

    :-)

    don't drink it now!

    Not kidding, don't drink it now!!!!

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  • good, but lacking in acidity

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  • Tropical fruit, pineapple, honey and a great combination of sweet, balance and acid. Can't wait to see how this develops

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  • Solid wine. Nothing changed since my last review. All the guests loved it. Impressed by the intensity of its nose and yet the lightness and delicacy of its taste. Great to accompany desserts

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  • Lovely.

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  • Drank over 4 days. This wine is clearly too young to be drinking perfectly and needs a lot of air to open up. On days 3 and 4, however, it did open up and was charmingly complex and pure with a great balance. I will cellar the rest of my stock until at least 2015. With enough age on it I wouldn't be suprised to be giving this an extraordinary score.

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  • Various and Sundry Germans (The Wine Club, San Francisco): Promising nose full of honey, but curiously this lacks intensity and brightness in the mid-palate which makes it come across as dull and too sweet. Nicer citrus emerges late, but the finish is not that long. Just so so.

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  • TN: 2006 Dönnhoff Oberhäuser Brücke Riesling Auslese AP 16; 8.0 pabv; Euros 25/375 ml, Weinhaus Porn, Bernkastel, Bernkastel-Kues, Land der Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, imported via Johannes Selbach as part of a shipment of tasting samples. This is the 'standard' bottling, as it's the practice at the estate to use gold capsules on all nobly sweet wines.

    After double decanting, brilliant gold with a yellow-brown tinge; very viscous and refractive; thick enough to coat the inside of the glass but with no true sheeting--all this is evidence of wine with exceptionally high extract.

    Initially very shy, with green tea, cherry, mango, and orange zest, and a high-toned, minty note at the end. Lively, almost agressive entry, with thick, tongue-coating viscosity, and barely perceptible acids and sweeness hidden beneath, showing cool mint and wet stones on the apparently endless finish.

    After about two hours of air, peach, cherries, and the scent of elm leaves, all edged with caramel, greet the nose. Acidity on entry is intense, and white-wine tannins coat the tongue, and a hint of leather escapes. Surprisingly, there is a hint of the umami note so prevalent in its Hermannshöhle stablemate. A touch of heat at the back of the tongue speaks probably of unresolved botrytis and unusually high glycerin levels, not surprising in this product of a foggy, low-lying Nahe-side vineyard enclosed by the eponymous Leopold bridge. There is a complex, scintillating finish dominated by herbaceous notes and fresh sweet tea.

    The following day the aromas have come together to give a definite frankincense impression which jumps out of the glass at one; scents of white peach and white (Rainier) cherry juices, slate freshly rained upon, and a delicate hint of saffron. The umami palate impression has increased slightly, edged by a zippy eiswein-like acidity*, and flows to an intense mid-palate depot of unresolved citrus-rind Edelfäule products, which tail into an attractive bittler note at the beginning of the finish, which cannot be better described as it has been above, I believe**.

    A few hours later I pulled it out of the refrigerator and it seems to be all umami and absolutely seamless; everything in place and not an edge in sight; it seems to wrap around your brain with its lushness brightened with a gloss of acidity. Darn. I've probably undervalued it by a point.

    A muscular and powerful Auslese from a great year for noble rot, yet not lacking in Dönnhoff's wistful, deftly sculpted winemaking style. This is typical of many of the great wines from his top vineyards being made now in what is the golden era of the estate. It has an almost pointillist precision of flavor, reminding one of the glitter of the gems of Idar-Oberstein upriver on the mountainous Hunsrück plateau. How can winemaking so consistent always contain so many delightful surprises, so serious be at the same time so lighthearted, vivid as one imagines a child senses the world unfolding to it for the first time, playful yet somehow significant?

    This will be one of the longer-lived Dönnhoff wines, and will definitely reward cellaring and even improve qualitatively with age, although strangely, it actually still has not finished organizing itself for the primary post-bottling phase.. 93+/100. Drink 2011-2036 and onward. A magnum of this [I understand a few came into the country] would be a wonderful discovery at the back of an old cellar a third of a century or more hence. (93+ pts.)
    _____________________

    *Does Helmut back-blend some Eiswein lots, which he nearly always produces in this vineyard to good effect, into his nobly sweet Brücke bottlings? I've heard it so from no less an authority than Terry Thiese, and as long as Terry doesn't go around calling these bottlings 'declassified Auslesen' as some might be tempted to do I have no objection to the practice or the information. In any case, Botrytis-affected eiswein lovers might be very pleased with this wine's style.

    **If a football official were witnessing the drinking of this wine, he'd be forced to drop a flag, probably more than one, here, for delay of game, and perhaps for unsportsmanlike conduct (is it really fair to ask other winemakers to compete with Gabi's and Helmut's wines, which might be best savored while paging through a Renoir table book with some bubbly Mozart as background music?

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  • White frosting, pineapple, mango, hazelnuts, baked apples on the nose. Beautiful from start to finish, caramelized pineapple, minerality, beautiful acidity. Great feel in the mouth, great body but light on it's feet. The acidity goes salty on the finish that lingers around for a good amount of time. Drinking so well now, this is a wine I could drink all day long. Upgraded to 95 points later in the night, going back through the line-up tonight this is on another level. Perfectly balanced.

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  • Exceptional smell. Pineapple, peach, tropical fruits. In the mouth, provides a great balance of sweetness, fruit and acidity. In particular, I find the acidity keeps this wine precise and well delineated. Light and smooth. Thank god I was inside, in the a/c while a typhoon 8 was going on outside... This is the sort of stuff you could drink all day on a sunny terrace!

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  • Big petrol and botrytis in the nose. Sweet and lush. Viscous. Fair acidity. Maybe a bit cloying. Not as good as the Niederhauser Hermannshohle. Still very good however. Needs some time.

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  • A little dull right now, but lots of potential. Thick, balanced. Not much sweeter than the 2006 Donnhoff Schlossbockelheimer Felsen Turmchen Riesling Spatlese (4/24/09). Delicious stuff. Wait 3–5 years. 93-95 points.

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  • Hands off for now. This is shut down pretty hard. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice drink, but a shadow of what I expect it to become.

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  • Nose of tangerine, pineapple and a bit of grassiness. On the palate this wine shows a well balanced sweetness that is nimble on your palate rather than clinging to it with its sugary weight. A complete mix of citrus flavors with a long finish.

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  • Consumed from 375ml format at Veritas, NYC. In the glass, golden yellow with the slightest tinge of orange. On the nose, an abundance of lychee syrup and stone fruit. On the palate, silky smooth with no hint of acid, and beautiful sweet fruit, with enough minerality to keep the sweetness in check. A beautiful accompaniment for seafood courses.

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  • texture of cashmere and and a kaleidescope of tropical fruits splashed with a blast of lime. floral notes waft above it all with a long finish, that doesn't quit, that throws dried apricots and slate into the mix. too easy to drink! stunning.

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  • Honey and a touch of spice to the nose. The palate is not as sweet as I expected, quite refined, minerally and subtle. Tasty and easy to drink.

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