Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine is rich and full while still having a tight structure. It shows a fine streak of acidity that shoots through the honey and gingered marmalade flavors. A fine wine with potential.
Barrel Sample: 93-95 -
Wine Spectator
Still youthfully rambunctious, this is packed with pineapple, ginger, bitter almond and apricot flavors. Despite the heft and weight, this has a glistening acidity and a long bitter orange and maple finish, and should unwind slowly in the cellar. Best from 2018 through 2035. 3,000 cases made.
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James Suckling
A wine with a solid core of dried fruit character from lemons to apple as well as hints of apricots. Full body, medium sweet and a lively finish. Very energetic finish. Better in 2020.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The sample of 2013 Doisy-Vedrines was showing a little reduction on the nose when I first tasted it. The palate is promising, however, perhaps more linear and less honeyed than recent vintages, but that is compensated by greater tension towards the middle and finish. You might describe this as a more streamlined Doisy-Vedrines, dare I say one that is more like Doisy-Daene in style, with wonderful mineralite on the finish. Range: 91-93
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.
Sweet and unctuous but delightfully charming, the finest Sauternes typically express flavors of exotic dried tropical fruit, candied apricot, dried citrus peel, honey or ginger and a zesty beam of acidity.
Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc, Sauvignon Gris and Muscadelle are the grapes of Sauternes. But Sémillon's susceptibility to the requisite noble rot makes it the main variety and contributor to what makes Sauternes so unique. As a result, most Sauternes estates are planted to about 80% Sémillon. Sauvignon is prized for its balancing acidity and Muscadelle adds aromatic complexity to the blend with Sémillon.
Botrytis cinerea or “noble rot” is a fungus that grows on grapes only in specific conditions and its onset is crucial to the development of the most stunning of sweet wines.
In the fall, evening mists develop along the Garonne River, and settle into the small Sauternes district, creeping into the vineyards and sitting low until late morning. The next day, the sun has a chance to burn the moisture away, drying the grapes and concentrating their sugars and phenolic qualities. What distinguishes a fine Sauternes from a normal one is the producer’s willingness to wait and tend to the delicate botrytis-infected grapes through the end of the season.