The 2017 Riesling Bernkasteler Badstube Auslese ** (Green Capsule) is an amazing wine that displays a bright, pretty pale citrus color and opens with a super precise, refined and nicely reductive bouquet of perfectly ripe and healthy Riesling berries intertwined with very fine aromas of crushed slate. This is amazing in its clarity, brightness and crunchy Mosel character! On the palate, this is a highly elegant, piquant and well-structured Badstube Auslese that terrifically combines ripeness, concentration and finesse. The wine is rich and filigreed at the same time, tightly structured but stimulatingly racy, crystalline and beautifully finessed, with a long and crunchy finish. Keep it for a decade or two. Tasted three times in March and April 2019. - SR

Scents of honeysuckle and honeydew liqueur anticipate the heady inner-mouth perfume and soothing richness that prevail on a polished, subtly creamy palate. Like a number of its siblings in the present collection, this displays stronger overt sweetness than I usually associate with Molitor green capsule bottlings, but that fits the wine’s effusive personality and liqueur-like sense of richness. On the other hand, I would hate to have witnessed this wine’s floral and fruity effusion pushed over the top or turned gaudy by 30 or 40 grams of residual sugar, let alone by the amount that 90% of leading Mosel proprietors deem appropriate for Auslese. And for all of its richness and sweetness, this beauty finishes almost weightlessly, with striking transparency to stony and alkaline nuances as well as enough apple and melon juiciness to refresh. -- David Schildknecht