Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes 2010
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Winemaker Notes
A cool year, but one made interesting thanks to a warm, dry summer. The weather was ideal during the harvest and the grapes were in great condition. It was vital to pick only the best terroirs and to avoid the temptation of too large a crop by a rigorous sorting and selection during blending. The result is brilliant and more profound that anyone had dared to hope.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium lemon-gold colored, the 2010 d'Yquem is just now starting to strut its stuff with gregarious scents emerging of underripe mangos, fresh pineapples, poached pears and candied peel plus nuances of waxed lemons, fungi, musk perfume and wet clay. Wonderfully poised, the seductively intense fruit is offset by beautiful freshness, supporting layer upon layer of savory nut and baked-bread notions with the tantalizing exotic fruits coming through on the long, long finish. For number crunchers: 13.5% alcohol, 138 grams per liter residual sugar, and total acidity is 3.6 grams per liter H2SO4. Tempting to drink now, I’m sensing there are still a lot of latent nuances to be revealed here. So—to get that full Yquem experience—I’d give it another five years in bottle, at least, and drink it over the next 40+ years.
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Wine Enthusiast
Impressively balanced, with the fruit rich, intense with a golden glow. The acidity is as important as the freshness, giving a delicious lift to the core of dry, concentrated botrytis. Obviously a great wine for long-term aging in a great Sauternes year.
Barrel Sample: 96-98 Points -
James Suckling
The purity of Botrytis in this wine is so impressive with dried fruits such apple and mango. And then spicy character. Full body and very sweet but it is incredibly fresh and lively. Such class and elegance. Perfectly manicured wine. Everything in the right place. This shows a delicacy and intensity that are spellbinding.
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Wine Spectator
Tropical and inviting, with lush mango, fig and papaya aromas followed by pineapple and creamed banana. The long tangerine finish is flattering and very open now, but the length is clearly there.
Barrel Sample: 93-96 Points
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Château d’Yquem is an extraordinary place, at the very heart of Sauternes, with a hundred hectares of vineyards are planted on a mosaic of different soils. All the conditions are there to grow exceptional grapes and achieve the finest noble rot, the famous botrytis cinerea.
Through a sublimation process, the grapes reach a level a richness in taste and aromas that is simply unique in the world. Yquem preciously protects its selective harvesting secret, carried out by a team of devoted highly experienced local pickers, who have received their ancestral knowledge from the generations that came before them. Therefore, only the best grapes sublimated by botrytis cinerea are picked, because this is the golden rule at Yquem: never look for simplification, or shortcuts, and accept the risk of losing everything.
This is the price to pay to achieve excellence.
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
Sweet and unctuous but delightfully charming, the finest Sauternes typically express flavors of exotic dried tropical fruit, candied apricot, dried citrus peel, honey or ginger and a zesty beam of acidity.
Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc, Sauvignon Gris and Muscadelle are the grapes of Sauternes. But Sémillon's susceptibility to the requisite noble rot makes it the main variety and contributor to what makes Sauternes so unique. As a result, most Sauternes estates are planted to about 80% Sémillon. Sauvignon is prized for its balancing acidity and Muscadelle adds aromatic complexity to the blend with Sémillon.
Botrytis cinerea or “noble rot” is a fungus that grows on grapes only in specific conditions and its onset is crucial to the development of the most stunning of sweet wines.
In the fall, evening mists develop along the Garonne River, and settle into the small Sauternes district, creeping into the vineyards and sitting low until late morning. The next day, the sun has a chance to burn the moisture away, drying the grapes and concentrating their sugars and phenolic qualities. What distinguishes a fine Sauternes from a normal one is the producer’s willingness to wait and tend to the delicate botrytis-infected grapes through the end of the season.