Zind-Humbrecht | Alsace | Riesling Brand Grand Cru | 2015 | 3000ml | bio

Description

Product description for Zind-Humbrecht Riesling Brand Grand Cru 2015 (bio)

Color

Rich golden yellow with antique gold reflections.

Nose

Salted lemons, orange blossom oil, bergamot, and toasted rice cakes open the multifaceted bouquet. Like a diva in colorful regalia with peacock feathers, the glass is filled with a shimmering aroma of wet chalk, spices like allspice and red pepper, as well as light tobacco, pear compote, and dried tangerine peel. A clear case for the larger glasses.

Palate

On the palate, it is viscous with a delicate residual sweetness that firmly envelops its mineral core and acidity. Firm to the bite with high internal tension and massive impact on the palate, it forms a gustatory isosceles triangle with its delicate spice, fine acidity, and saline minerality, where the fruit aromas break open into a shimmering prism, like on the Pink Floyd cover of “The Dark Side of the Moon.” The aromas of the nose are reflected on the palate, albeit still youthfully leptosome. Powerful and approachable, it’s a great pleasure for immediate consumption or for several years of bottle aging.

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Keywords: Zind-Humbrecht Riesling Brand Grand Cru 2015 bio Alsace France

Wine Advocate

Score: (95-96)

From granite soils, Humbrecht’s 2015 Riesling Brand is terribly pure, fine and highly precise, delivering crushed stones and lemon perfume, as if it were another Sommerberg. Exciting! On the palate, this is a lush yet pure, intense and ripe, yet mineral and piquant Riesling; it has great elegance, noble intensity and great terroir expression. What a stimulating richness but also purity here, a beautifully fine tannin grip (as if it was Pinot Noir), and a long and persistent finish. This is a must buy of the vintage. Olivier compares the 2015 to 1983, which was also a very warm year and delivered elegant wines. This is pure, rich, lean, piquant and mineral, very stony, lush and fruity. Most of all, it is full of energy and fascination! A must buy!
Stephan Reinhardt

Vinous

Score: 96+

Luminous straw-yellow. The broad nose hints at herbs, spices and ripe orchard fruit and is really very typical of a wine born from granite soils. Then large and broad on entry too; spice and herb notes complicate peach and pear fruit flavors. Finishes long and pure, like a morning stroll in a forest full of small yellow flowers and spring water, but also nicely saline and tactile. Though it’s easy to recognize this wine as coming from the Brand when tasting blind, I also think the 2015 is a little more youthfully reticent than usual. Humbrecht told me the Brand Riesling is on a roll, and he wouldn’t know which to pick as his favorite in the last three vintages (the 2013, ’14 and ’15). Forget about this in your cellar for 10 years; at 13.7% alcohol and 6 g/L residual sugar, it’s a powerful wine that tastes off-dry, and cellaring it will help it blossom into something even more special than it already is.
— Ian D’Agata
Drinking window: 2024 – 2039
Review date: Apr 2018

Producer website: http://www.zindhumbrecht.fr/