The Knipser’s 2007 Lammersheimer Mandelberg Steinbuckel Riesling Grosses Gewachs is scented with winter pear, lime, and clover. With a doughy substantiality and creamy texture on the palate, it lacks quite the refreshment, grace, or transparency of its Himmelrech stable-mate; although a sense of wet stone and an aura of smokiness – along with faint citrus rind bitterness and gooseberry tartness – persist past the fruit in its finish. This might well be worth following for half a dozen or more years. Like a number of these Knipser wines, I tasted it twice at a year’s interval with similar impressions. The Knipser brothers, Volker and Werner – farming on the line with Rheinhessen and only a few miles away from such growers as Keller, Spanier, Wintner, and Wittmann – have long enjoyed adulation in the German press. Whether because of the only modest degree to which I was impressed by those few wines I had tasted until recently, or from subconscious prejudice against an estate that first came to my attention in the early ‘90s – and gained early prominence inside Germany – for having planted Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah, I have neglected to visit them. But I tasted a range of their recent releases and was duly impressed, if not – especially when it comes to the much-lionized Knipser Pinot Noirs – to the same degree as are many of my German colleagues. This estate offers an extreme example of confusing recent trends in German wine labeling. On what are for all intents and purposes (save legal tush-covering) Knipser’s front labels, their upper-tier wines generally bear only the names of the individual parcels (which officially disappeared in 1971) in which they grew, while on the reverse side, they bear only the official post-1971 single-vineyard names, no fewer than four of which the VDP – inspired, dare I suggest, by the results at this estate? – classifies as suitable for Grosses Gewachs. As in other similar situations I have rendered the official wine name followed by the parcel identity. Importer: Magellan Wine Imports, Inc., Centennial, CO; tel. (720) 272-6544