J.J. Prum Bernkasteler Badstube Spatlese Riesling 2020

95 points James Suckling
All the flowers of spring here, plus the first fruits and berries of summer. Wonderful brilliance and subtlety on the sleek, focused palate, the finish very much on the drier side for a wine of this category. Wonderful wet-stone freshness at the uplifting finish. Drink or hold.

93 points Wine Advocate
The 2020 Bernkasteler Badstube Sp??tlese opens with a concentrated, finely flinty/mineral bouquet of fully ripe and slightly stewed stone fruits intermingled with iodine nuances. Dense and lush on the palate and provided with ripe, crystalline and imbedded salinity, this is a mouth-filling and quite intense Sp??tlese that is already accessible. 7.5% stated alcohol. Natural cork. Tasted at the domaine from AP 13 21 in July 2022. Pr??m's 2020s are without exception narrative Rieslings, shaped by their respective origins, which to taste always means pleasure and even relaxation but never real work. It will certainly not be easy for the 2021s to outdo the partly grandiose 2020s once these show fascinating clarity, finesse and elegance. Even Dr. Manfred Pr??m, probably not a man of praise, had to admit at the end, "That was a highly enjoyable wine tasting; that's how I like it!" He wanted to explicitly praise his daughter Katharina for the 2020 vintage, but at the subsequent lunch he preferred to devote himself and us to two wines from the archive. Thank goodness Pr??m wines speak for themselves anyway, so who needs praise?