Keller Riesling Niersteiner Hipping Grosses Gewächs 2011

94.3 points CellarTracker.com community score.

94+ points John Gilman (View From the Cellar): "The impossibly steep Hipping vineyard in Nierstein, with its eighty percent grade, has to be one of the great viticultural challenges in Rheinhessen, but also one of the most rewarding vineyards for those who are intrepid enough to cultivate their vines in these superb, red slate soils. The 2011 Keller Hipping Grosses Gewächs is a great wine in the making, offering up a very complex and refined nose of grapefruit, lemongrass, wild yeasts, tart pear, slate, gentle petrol tones and a topnote of dried flowers. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, pure and utterly suave on the attack, with a lovely core, crisp acids, fine focus and excellent length and grip on the bright and seamless finish. The acids here are quite present, but so beautifully ripe that they will allow this fine wine to provide some impressive early drinking. That said, I would still try to give this wine at least another five years in the cellar to allow its secondary layers of complexity to emerge. A supremely elegant wine which carries its 12.5 percent alcohol with cool and collected calm. 2017-2040. (Mar/Apr 2012)"

92 points David Schildknecht (Wine Advocate): "Bacon fat and wood smoke; peach, grapefruit and orange with pronounced piquancy of pit and rind, inform the nose and subtly oily palate of Keller's 2011 Niersteiner Hipping Riesling Grosses Gewachs, an immediately-recognizable expression of this famous red slate site. As in so many recent instances chez Keller, there is an impressive alliance of richness and overt extract with vivacity and energy. This finishes with admirable persistence and a sort of afterglow of distilled pit fruits. A bottle open for a day was even more impressive than one freshly-opened. It should be worth following for at least the better part of a decade. (2/27/13)"