Winemaker Notes
Our Merchant Prince is classified 'Rare' - it is the pinnacle, the richest, most complex and complete wine. The ultimate in intensity. Raisined sweetness explodes on the front of the palate. Complex nutty flavors flow through the full length of the palate and the drying tannin finish lingers for many minutes.
Fruit is left to ripen on the vine until as late as possible to ensure the necessary high degree of lusciousness. Juice is fermented for only a very short time before being fortified with neutral spirit and stored in oak to mature. Only the very best fruit from the finest vintages is used in the blend. As with any blended wine, it is difficult to specify an exact age. The oldest base wine is well over 60 years old, with only wines of the highest standard from excellent vintages being added to this outstanding solera.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A deep mahogany in color, the Merchant Prince Rare Muscat boastd dense date. fudge and molasses components balanced by rancio, citrusy accents and even some floral notes. Despite being incredibly sweet and sticky, there's a freshness to it that keeps it from being overwhelming.
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Decanter
It is complex, thick, powerful and balanced, with sweet coffee, bitter chocolate, Xmas cake, salted caramel, fig and prune flavours to the fore, acidity tightening up and extending the persistent finish. Stunning!
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Vinous
The heavy-set NV Rare Muscat Merchant Prince (2024 release) is impressively endowed with lashings of dried fruit, dark caramel and coffee grounds dusted with old spice. Incredible depth of fruit and intensity follow in a viscous package, with some developed earthy or dusty tones building on an extremely long finish.
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.
Located in the warm and dry northeastern corner of the state of Victoria, bordering the southern side of the Murray River, the Rutherglen region bears a long history of fortified wine production.
Rutherglen's main variety, Muscat blanc à Petits Grains (also known as Brown Muscat or Muscat à Petit Grains Rouge for its often pink- or red-tinged berries) flourishes in the region’s deep, moisture retaining, alluvial, red loam soils. To make the distinguished and aptly named fortified, "Rutherglen," these Muscat grapes are harvested after left to semi-raisin on the vine. Fermentation only reaches a few degrees alcohol before the juice is fortified with grape spirit and aged in a barrel system resembling a cross between a Sherry solera and a Madeira estufagem. Rutherglen wines boast great concentration and fine aromas hinting at orange flowers and spice, and are capable of astounding quality.
The Rutherglen region grows second grape, called Muscadelle (confusingly unrelated Muscat), which also produces a quality fortified wine. Historically Australians called the grape “Tokay” and believed it to have Hungarian ancestry but when the French ampelographer, Paul Truel, identified it as Muscadelle in 1976, the name had to be changed. Today varietal wines made from Muscadelle can be called, “Topaque.”