Winemaker Notes
Blend: 75% Sémillon, 23% Sauvignon Blanc, 2% Muscadelle
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
A triumph for the vintage with spices, dried mushroom, dried pineapple, peaches, and honey. Full and sweet with bright acidity and a long, intense finish. Powerful wine. This could be the best Coutet ever.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium gold colored, the 2009 Coutet leaps from the glass with warm apple pie, dried mango, fresh straw, lemongrass, ginger and crème caramel notes. The rich, concentrated, unctuous flavors are lifted by amazing freshness, finishing epically long, layered and with a tantalizing nuttiness.
-
Wine Spectator
Very lightly toasty, this is more floral for now, with lively honeysuckle and pineapple notes up front, giving way to richer hints of warm brioche, fig, glazed pear and lemon shortbread that should emerge more with time. The long, lacy finish has the poise and balance for long-term cellaring. Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle. Best from 2014 through 2034.
-
Wine Enthusiast
Dense and rich, this wine has concentrated flavors of botrytis and floral honey. The wine gives the impression of sweetness, with balancing acidity and a core of dryness. Weighty and dense, it's likely to age.
Cellar Selection
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.
Characterized by dried tropical fruit, candied apricot, citrus and honey, the sweet wines of Barsac are always balanced by a bright beam of acidity. While technically also part of the Sauternes region, Barsac’s sandy and limestone soils produce a lighter version in comparison. Its main grapes are the same: Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc, Sauvignon Gris and Muscadelle.