Chateau Coutet (375ML half-bottle) 2017
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Enthusiast
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Suckling
James -
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Dunnuck
Jeb - Decanter
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Robert
Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
Of a light and pale color. The nose offers great complexity with notes of citrus (lime, lemon), ginger, and apricot, but also white flowers. On the palate, the attack is of a beautiful liveliness with a remarkable aromatic freshness. The crisp and generous character is highlighted by citrus and orange essence. The mid-palate is full, and keeps a nice full-bodied texture. The wine offers a nice balance with the minerality that comes through and its freshness lengthens the wine for a long finish.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine shows great balance and poised elegance. Its botrytis fruit gives it rich intensity, with a ripe orange-marmalade flavor and layers of tight acidity. This will be a wine for serious aging and not ready to drink before 2024.
Barrel Sample: 95-97 -
James Suckling
Wow. Fabulous focus and intensity to this wine with energetic sweetness and long, linear quality through the center palate. Orange-peel, lemon and peach undertones. Fresh finish. Drink or hold.
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Wine Spectator
This is youthfully packed, with a green tea accent wrapping up a dense core of creamed pineapple, yellow apple chutney, candied pink grapefruit and quince flavors. The long finish is viscous but bright, gilded liberally with ravishing singed almond and hazelnut notes. Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle. Best from 2022 through 2045.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Another rocking sweet wine is the 2017 Château Coutet. This big, full-bodied, opulent beauty has serious notes of orange blossom, buttered citrus, and honey, yet also shows the more pure, precise, and elegant style of the vintage on the palate. The cool, overcast summer allowed good ripeness while preserving the purity of fruit and the whites (and dessert wines) from this vintage are beautiful!
Barrel Sample: 93-95 -
Decanter
Rich sunflower yellow in colour, this has a good concentration of subtle spiced ginger on the nose, followed by rich citrus and apricot tart flavours, going almost as far as white truffles. It's gourmet without being cloying, thanks to those Barsac soils which give a wonderful freshness through the palate. The acidity is not quite as focussed as in classic years for the appellation, but it has zip and personality and is a clear success in this vintage.
Barrel Sample -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Coutet has a super intense nose of ripe apricots, honey-coated nuts, warm pineapple and mango with touches of nutmeg and orange blossoms. Rich, sweet and unctuous, it has wonderful intensity and depth, finishing with fantastic length.
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Wine
Thomas Jefferson celebrated Chateau Coutet as the best Sauternes from Barsac during his ambassadorship to France. In 1855, recognized for its continued excellence, the estate was classified as a first growth. Today, Chateau Coutet stays true to its tradition of distinction and quality by producing the finest Barsac year after year. With an average age of 35 years, the vines of Semillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle have developed a network of deep roots to extract elements from the limestone and clay-based terroir, giving the grapes freshness, richness and strength. For this reason, the wine carries the name "Coutet," derived from the Gascon's word for knife, to signify the fresh, lively and crisp palate taht is the estate's signature style.
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.