Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Amber-colored with an alluring perfume of apricot and dried fruits, caramel and toffee. Full-bodied, sweet, and complex.
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Wine Spectator
Sweet and spicy, this sneaks up on you, starting off with pretty brown sugar notes and adding layers of spice, prune, raisin and fig that linger on the extra-long finish. Not at all harsh. Drink now. 2,500 cases made.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: Way Down Under is the place for some of the finest dessert Muscats. The Campbell Rutherglen Muscat is powerful in its richness. TASTING NOTES: One must enjoy sweetness before uncorking this wine. Its aromas and flavors of very ripe fruit and a suggestion of oak. Tasted: November 8, 2018, San Francisco, CA)
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Decanter
Elegant and aromatic with a dried orange peel and creme brulee nose, then a dried fig, coffee and concentrated raisin palate.
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Wine Enthusiast
Fresh and vibrant, with perfumed, orange-like aromas, this is an excellent introduction to the Rutherglen Muscat style. It's not as full bodied or rich as some versions, but instead shows off the youthful components of the blend, ending with pronounced citrus notes.
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Wine & Spirits
Smoky and rich, this wine’s golden raisin and toffee flavors are clean and delicious. It’s a smooth, unctuous dessert wine for late-night sipping.
Best Buy
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.”