Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Wine Spectator
Offers a bright inner core of honeysuckle, pineapple, star fruit and white peach flavors, coated for now with heather honey, marzipan and mango notes. Fresh and racy through the finish, this is an elegant beauty, showing terrific cut and precision. Best from 2015 through 2030.
-
James Suckling
A sweet wine with honey and sliced apple character with lemon. Full body, medium sweet and a bright finish. It's layered and fascinating. So much spicy, botrytis and dried mushroom powder. Turns creamy. Drink or hold.
-
Wine Enthusiast
This is a very spicy wine with weight, great depth of flavor and concentration. Fine acidity cuts through the core, balancing sweetness and adding freshness to flavors of wild thyme-honey and orange marmalade. Drink the wine from 2017. Cellar Selection
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium lemon-gold colored, the 2010 Coutet is relatively evolved, revealing honey nut, ginger ale and baked peaches scents with touches of straw, fresh figs, quince paste and nutmeg. The palate is considerably more mature than when I last reviewed this wine a couple of years age, so I suspect this bottle may have been slightly oxidized, nonetheless it offers loads of nutty nuances accenting the dried fruits, finishing deliciously spicy.
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.