Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Thick and very, very sweet. Like syrup. Incredible concentration and sweetness. Toffee, molasses and prune. Long and powerful. Drink it by the spoonful. Drink now. 190 cases made.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 1995 Vin Santo, a toffee-colored amber, presents high-toned aromatics, along with otherworldly layers of roasted nuts, licorice, smoke and dried figs on a full-bodied, unctuous frame, revealing a new shade of expression with each taste. Not made for the faint of heart, this massively constituted Vin Santo is capable of aging for decades. A blend of Grechetto, Malvasia and Trebbiano, it spent eight years in small oak barrels prior to being bottled. Anticipated maturity: 2007-2027.
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.
This significant Tuscan village—not to be confused with the red grape of the same name widely grown in Abruzzo and the Marche regions—was home to one of the first four Italian DOCGs granted in 1980.
Based on the Sangiovese grape (here called Prugnolo Gentile), the village’s prized wine called Vino Nobile di Montepulciano ranks stylistically in between Chianti Classico, for its finesse, and Brunello di Montalcino for its power. With a deep ruby color, heavy concentration and a firm structure given by the village's heavy, cool clay soils, most Vino Nobile di Montepulciano will demand some bottle age.