Winemaker Notes
This is a sweet wine, but because of the natural acidity, it is fresh and clear with a full mouthfeel and lingering finish. Delicious with seasonal desserts such as apple pie, pears, peach cobbler and persimmon pudding.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Deep vivid gold. Powerful aromas of orange marmalade apricot preserves honey and candied rose; a gingery nuance adds vivacity. Supple sweet and broad on entry offering intense pit fruit liqueur and honey flavors that pick up a subtle note of bitter orange pith as the wine opens up. Impressively lively for such a lush sweet wine. Finishes very long and juicy displaying building spiciness and a resonating floral note.
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.
The Chehalem Mountains is a northwest-southeast span of several distinct mountains, ridges and peaks in the northern part of the Willamette Valley. Of all of Willamette Valley's smaller AVAs, it is closest to the city of Portland. Its highest summit, Bald Peak at an elevation of 1,633 feet, serves to generate cooler air for the rest of the AVA and its hillside vineyards. The region covers 70,000 acres but only 1,600 acres are planted to vines; soils of the Chehalem Mountains are a mix of basalt, ocean sediment and loess.