2015 Immich-Batterieberg Enkircher Batterieberg Riesling, Mosel

Although the wine from this producer's monopole site has the tart peaches and herbs in common with most of the other wines, this has a different level of concentration and finesse. It starts out quite juicy and playful, but this is as dark and complex as one of Hitchcock's leading ladies. The intensity of the salty mineral character on the finish is something else; a great wine with great ageing potential!

95 points jamessuckling.com

The 2015 Riesling Enkircher Batterieberg is from 80+-year-old ungrafted vines on stony slate soils with a higher quartzite portion. Its nose combines the purity and deepness of the rocky terroir with perfectly ripe, concentrated Riesling and some lemon flavors. The wine is full-bodied, rich and round on the palate since it contains almost nine grams of residual sugar because the fermentation in old barriques stopped by itself. However, this sweetness combined with the extract and concentration will take the Batterieberg into a great future even though it takes away a bit of purity and transparency at this early stage. The finish is long and reveals a very good, age-worthy structure.

More and more and thus far with each vintage even more convincing, Gernot Kollmann is pushing Immich-Batterieberg (one of the oldest wine estates of the Mosel valley) into the small but fine group that produces really great dry Rieslings along the Mosel, Saar and Ruwer. They are sourced from five extremely steep grand cru vineyards located between Traben-Trarbach and Enkirch. All of them were ranked in the highest class of the Prussian Vineyard Classification of 1868, which itself was based on Napoleon’s single plot classification of 1804: Ellergrub, Zeppwingert and Batterieberg (on particularly quartzite-rich slate soils) as well as the pure south-facing Steffensberg (on iron-rich slate). Since late 2014, the Trabener Zollturm is the fifth grand cru of the domaine. A very large portion of the vines are very old (60+ years) and ungrafted and, thus, provide a rare genetic diversity but also naturally low yields (30 hectoliters per hectare or even less). Combined with the organic/biodynamic farming, this leads to deep and complex, highly individual, precise and elegant Rieslings for which only the finest barrels are chosen to become grand cru. The de-classified wines from the grands crus source the Escheburg, which is an impressive super second. Regarding the 2015 vintage, Gernot Kollmann is not less enthusiastic than his colleagues. "Given this very hot summer, we are finally surprised how much acidity and finesse the wines have. Also, the harvest was very easy. Botrytis was very rare and during the vegetation period we had just four sprayings to protect our vines." The Immich team started harvesting not as early as others on October 12, but had already finished 17 days later on October 29. The crus were all picked during the last week of the harvest. The botrytis was sorted out and, in the Zeppwingert, selected for a fascinating, piquant and mineral Auslese in the old Immich style. Kollmann's range is full of highlights and only the Zollturm does not yet have the vitality and tension of the other crus. But, that's mainly due to the fact that this cru has only been cultivated by Immich-Batterieberg since 2015 and needs a couple of years to adapt to the organic farming that gives the other crus so much more precision, vitality and energy after a few years! The Ellergrub and the Zeppwingert are outstanding in their purity, finesse and elegance as well as in their terroir expression. The old-styled Auslese (which is much less sweet than most of its peers) is simply gorgeous and provided with electrifying acidity!

93+ points SR robertparker.com Drink to 2050