The 2017 Pündericher Marienburg Riesling Raffes is the essence of gray slate. Bright in color and flavors but also intense and intermixed with lemon-fresh stony notes, this is a concentrated yet pure, fresh and finessed, highly intense and refined Riesling with great length and an endless finish. This is a powerful but Auslese-styled Riesling with concentration, finesse and lots of power but no alcoholic impression. The wine was bottled with 13% alcohol and almost nine grams of residual sugar. Tasted March 2019.- SR

Almond- and pit-inflected peach dominates on the nose and the plush, silken palate. The forward, luscious fruit on exhibit is joined on an impressively lingering finish by invigoratingly pungent herbal inflections and tangy, saline and piquant expression of peach at the core. Residual sugar here flirts with the limit for legal Trockenheit, but that’s a good thing, not just for the way it reinforces the wine’s vivid fruitiness but also for tempering its alcohol, because as is, we are at 13% and there is a faint hint of heat that kept me from awarding a higher score. (Full disclosure, though: this is a bottling about which certain of my savvy colleagues have gone over the moon, so perhaps I’m being too hard on it or caught it in one of its less expressive moments.) -- David Schildknecht