Winemaker Notes
The 2016 Chateau Bastor-Lamontagne Sauternes displays a sustained gold color. Complex apricot and slightly spicy nose (white pepper, ginger) enhanced by notes of clementine. The attack is dense, with a nice freshness. There are flavors of pineapple, exotic fruits and vanilla. This wine has a nice structure to finish with a nice tension.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
This is wonderfully fresh, not in fact that rich but beautifully fragrant and complex wine. In the second tasting, a fresh ginger aspect is more evident. I can really see the improvement in this estate since the Cathiard's winemaking team have come on board, bringing acidity, tension and purity. 80% Sémillon and 20% Sauvignon Blanc.
Barrel Sample -
Wine Enthusiast
This wine has sweetness and a honeyed character, but it is the rich botrytized fruit that allows it to have depth and density. The ample acidity lends balance to the palate and refreshment to the finish.
Barrel Sample: 91–93 Points -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale lemon in color, the 2016 Bastor-Lamontagne leaps from the glass with candied lemon peel, apple tart, nutmeg and honeycomb scents plus a waft of fresh hay. The palate reveals impressive depth with loads of honey-nut and earthy accents with the citrus and apple layers, finishing perfumed.
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.
Sweet and unctuous but delightfully charming, the finest Sauternes typically express flavors of exotic dried tropical fruit, candied apricot, dried citrus peel, honey or ginger and a zesty beam of acidity.
Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc, Sauvignon Gris and Muscadelle are the grapes of Sauternes. But Sémillon's susceptibility to the requisite noble rot makes it the main variety and contributor to what makes Sauternes so unique. As a result, most Sauternes estates are planted to about 80% Sémillon. Sauvignon is prized for its balancing acidity and Muscadelle adds aromatic complexity to the blend with Sémillon.
Botrytis cinerea or “noble rot” is a fungus that grows on grapes only in specific conditions and its onset is crucial to the development of the most stunning of sweet wines.
In the fall, evening mists develop along the Garonne River, and settle into the small Sauternes district, creeping into the vineyards and sitting low until late morning. The next day, the sun has a chance to burn the moisture away, drying the grapes and concentrating their sugars and phenolic qualities. What distinguishes a fine Sauternes from a normal one is the producer’s willingness to wait and tend to the delicate botrytis-infected grapes through the end of the season.