Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Tasted again in March 2016, the NV Rare Muscat has a deep brown color with a distinctive green tinge to the rim. The nose is, in a word, incredible and terribly difficult to describe, which is a great thing. Rancio doesn't begin to capture the complex, oxidative signature: honey coated walnuts, molasses, dates, sandalwood, baking spices, old chesterfields, aniseed and potpourri with fleeting, ethereal wafts of incense, roasted nut and exotic spice notes. Rich, unctuous and gratuitously multi-layered, this is one for the hedonists.
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Wine Enthusiast
A rich, comforting coffee color with a slight green rim, Chambers’s Rare Muscat is a national treasure, with vines over a century old and from a solera blending system that’s even older. Like sinking into your favorite armchair at the end of a long day, it envelops the senses in a cloak of melted dark chocolate, hazelnut, milky coffee, toffee and the spine of an old library book. The palate is intensely concentrated, with a viscous texture that glides satin-like over the tongue. The alcohol is present but in check, and a remarkable freshness remains. Divinely indulgent, to be savored slowly on its own or drunk with a nutty dark chocolate dessert.
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Vinous
This stunning NV Rare Muscat Rutherglen (2024 release), from a solera started in the 1890s, has everything going for it, carrying both incredible complexity and impeccable balance. It boasts a freight train of aromas with strong rancio elements, combined with blackberry, chocolate, tar, roasted chestnut and mahogany. A sublime texture follows with a massive volume of enthralling flavors that last for what seems like an eternity.
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Wine Spectator
Rich and concentrated, this offers an unctuous, lush mouthful of date nut bread, candied ginger, chocolate-covered pretzel, candied orange zest and toasted cashew notes. The flavors are harmonious and expressive. A second wave of flavors and a jolt of acidity on the finish make this epic. Drink now through 2030.
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.”