Winemaker Notes
Blend: 95% Semillon, 5% Sauvignon Blanc
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This young Sauternes shows beautiful richness and ripeness with mango, pineapple and peach character. Full-bodied, layered and gorgeous. So refined and complex. Love the harmony and depth. Always so refined. Such beauty. Drink or hold.
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Decanter
Sweet spices, tropical fruit nectar and spicy clover honey on the nose and rich palate. Finishes very long and thick, with a tactile quality and lingering citrus appeal. A knockout Sauternes in the making. Barrel Sample.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Clos Haut Peyraguey is a blend of 95% Semillon and 5% Sauvignon Blanc, cropped at just 14 hectoliters per hectare between September 7 and October 15. It has a perfumed and quite floral bouquet with dried yellow flowers intermixed with dried honey and quince aromas. The palate is very well balanced with pure botrytised fruit, not the most complex Sauternes of the vintage, but tensile with a citrus-fresh, blood orange-tinged finish. Enjoy this over the next 5-25 years. Barrel Sample: 91-93 points
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Wine Enthusiast
Poised between crispness and richness, this is a well-balanced wine. With touches of spice as well as fragrant honey and orange-marmalade flavors, the wine is already delicious. It also will age well, with a ripe, generous future. Drink the wine from 2023.
Cellar Selection -
Wine Spectator
A broad, unctuous style, with creamed mango and papaya notes that impart a tropical feel, while light green tea, honeysuckle and singed almond notes help this along. Long glazed peach echo on the finish. Drink now through 2037.
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.