critic reviews
Straight from the bottle, the 2016 Niederberg Helden Riesling "GG" offers a clear, very complex and pure bouquet of crushed stones and citrus fruits. The other day (from the same bottle), the wine showed much more fruity aromas on the more developed and intense bouquet. Full-bodied and concentrated on the palate, with lush and elegant, very persistent and mineral-flavored fruit (with juniper flavors), this is a rich, powerful, very juicy but also silky and crystalline Helden grand cru with a very long and structured finish. There are some tannins in the aftertaste (due to a bit of newer oak perhaps?). Tasted March 2018.
Scents of lime, cassis and walnut oil usher in a firm but polished palate featuring invigorating tartness of juicy citrus, apple, white peach and seedy, thick-skinned dark berries. The impressively sustained finish perpetuates this wine’s brightness (surprising, considering its analytically very modest acidity) for invigoration and consummate refreshment. It further benefits from piquant, smoky nut oils, underlying wet stone, saliva-liberating salinity and a cooling sense of green herbal infusion. Here is the closest (two weeks after mid-July bottling) that any of the formidable 2016 Schloss Lieser Grosse Gewächse comes to lusciousness of fruit. But nobody could claim that it stints on mineral elements or lacks structural rectitude.