Winemaker Notes
The nose reveals jammy quince and fig aromas together with toasted and vanilla notes, as well as fresher notes of ginger, preserved lemon and lemon curd.
Blend: 94% Sémillon, 5% Sauvignon Blanc, 1% Muscadelle
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2022 Château Coutet is more deep gold-hued and has a ripe, powerful style in its brioche, toasted bread, honeyed orange, and marmalade-like aromas and flavors. It's a rich, unctuous, full-bodied effort that has serious density and depth.
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Vinous
The 2022 Coutet delivers nuances of pineapple, tangerine oil, orange confit and spice. Exotic and unctuous, it's also light on its feet for such an obviously rich wine.
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Wine Spectator
Ripe, unctuous and deliciously rendered, this pumps out orange blossom, peach, apricot and pineapple upside-down cake notes that are seamlessly stitched with bitter almond and orange threads. Offers a long, seductively glazed finish. Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle.
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James Suckling
Tempting dried fruit here with spice and floral character. Full and creamy with attractive acidity and a textural finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
One of the wines of the vintage, the 2022 Coutet opens with notes of apricots, spices and exotic fruits, setting the stage for a medium to full-bodied, round and supple palate enhanced by brightness and tension that culminates in a spicy, minty finish. Its balanced structure and lively acidity contribute to an ethereal ending, making it a very elegant yet chiseled Barsac. This blend of 94% Sémillon, 5% Sauvignon Blanc and 1% Muscadelle. Rating: 94+
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.