Winemaker Notes
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.
With recorded history of red wine production since the Middle Ages, Carmignano is a small, ancient, central Italian subregion ten miles northwest of Florence. Carmignano grows Sangiovese with great success in low-lying hills of 160 to 650 feet above sea level.
It is the only Tuscan DOC that required the inclusion of (up to 20%) Cabernet Sauvignon in its Sangiovese-based wines years before it became popular in the Super Tuscan blends.