Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
The wine is ripe yet stylish and pure. It has a great balance between bright acidity and rich fruitiness. It is a very fine wine with great aging potential, as it hints at the more opulent future to come. Barrel Sample: 95-97 Points
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Jeb Dunnuck
A heavenly dessert wine, the 2015 Château Coutet boasts a huge nose of caramelized citrus, crème brûlée, tangerine, and honeysuckle. With huge richness and sweetness, moderate acidity, a thick, fat mouthfeel and a blockbuster finish, it’s borderline over the top yet holds it together. It will be interesting to see how this evolves, but it’s undeniably gorgeous today.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Coutet is pale lemon colored with intense grapefruit, lemon pie and pineapple notes with touches of crushed rocks, honeycomb and lime zest plus a waft of orange blossoms. Rich, opulent and layered with loads of tropical and citrus notes, it has wonderful freshness, finishing long.
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Wine Spectator
Flattering, with a mix of pineapple, peach, pear and yellow apple flavors that give this both treble and base. Gilded with heather and lemon curd on the finish, with a flash of piecrust that should blossom as this matures. Best from 2020 through 2040.
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Decanter
A rich and deep wine, the bitter orange and mandarin coming in on the finish. It has a silky texture and delivers a beautiful fresh finish. Powerful, intense and complex.
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James Suckling
Conentrated, creamy and elegant, this is a beautiful Barsac with delicate exotic-fruit character and a very long, rather oily finish. You could drink it now, but it will gain a lot from extended ageing.
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.