Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Australian Wine Companion
The olive rim to a walnut-brown heart of the colour sets the scene; the heady essence of raisin bouquet pushes any discussions of the fortifying spirit to the back row; in its place there is an Arabian bazaar of spices, with a nod to Turkish baklava, then a rolling wave of Christmas pudding with a garnish of dark chocolate and caramelised roast nuts. The ultimate magic of the Chambers wines lies in the freshness of the finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a beautiful fortified, composed of solera wines going back a staggering 120 years. Espresso colored, it exudes dried fig, praline, butterscotch, smoke and mocha aromas. The palate is intensely sweet, with a lick of alcohol heat, but with beautiful freshness to buoy the dried orange, fig and toffee flavors, which linger long on the endless finish. Savor with a caramel-and fruitbased dessert.
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Vinous
Comprising a solera dating back to the 1930s and an average wine age over 25 years, the NV Grand Muscat Rutherglen (2024 release) is showing decades of fastidious care by the Chambers family. This robust wine marries hearty aromas of dried fruits, chocolate, burnt orange and dusty/earthy tones with both youthful and aged components. This is beautifully textured and fresh, with weighty flavors that extend over an exceptional finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
With a medium brown color going slightly green at the edge, NV Rosewood Vineyards Grand Muscat has aromas of macerated sultanas, fig paste, baklava, toasted hazelnuts and coffee grounds plus a little mace. The palate is very sweet and very crisp with an unctuous silkiness that blankets the mouth and lingers a very long time.
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Wine Spectator
Toasted hazelnut, salted caramel and dark chocolate–covered coffee bean flavors are bold and intense, set on a smooth and silky frame, but with plenty of freshness to stand up to the sweetness. Spice and tobacco notes linger. Drink now through 2028.
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.”