Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
One of the top sweet wines in this report is the 2016 Château Coutet, which has the vintage’s plush, opulent style as well as thrilling purity and good acids. Pineapple, white flowers, sugared peach, and honeyed notes all emerge from this full-bodied, layered, balanced Barsac that’s already impossible to resist yet will evolve gracefully 2+ decades.
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine is dense, mingling spicy nutmeg along with superb ripe honey and marmalade flavors. With its balanced acidity and opulence, it is going to be a great wine.
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James Suckling
The vibrant, tropical fruit-coulis character draws you into this concentrated and elegant Barsac. Then the crisp acidity and a wave of lemon and mineral character comes through, driving the finish out in the direction of the horizon. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale lemon colored, the 2016 Coutet reveals gorgeous quince paste, candied ginger and key lime pie scents with touches of lemon marmalade and peach compote. Full-bodied, rich and seriously seductive, it has a lively line cutting through the sweet, dense layers and epically long finish.
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Wine Spectator
Unctuous in feel, with marzipan, candied orange peel and praline notes leading the way for a juicy display of mango, peach and papaya flavors. The rich finish has a nice toasty hint. Best from 2023 through 2038.
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.