Winemaker Notes
Blend: 65% Semillon, 35% Bauvignon Blanc
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
This gorgeous Sauternes is still really tight, with racy floral and green plum edges along the core flavors of white peach, mirabelle plum, melon and green fig, but there's stunning length, with a rapier of minerality that matches the sweetness step for step on the long, quinine-infused finish. Built for the long haul. Best from 2018 through 2038.
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James Suckling
Extremely intense aromas of dried mushroom, flower petal with pineapples and apricots. Full body, medium sweet and a fantastic intensity of botrytis. Very structured and rich. A classic styled Sauternes. Better in 2018.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2013 Guiraud has a generous bouquet of rich honeyed fruit interlaced with quince and hints of marmalade, though I would like to see more mineralite and tension by the time of bottling. The palate is well-balanced with a spice-tinged entry, touches of Seville orange and mandarin emerging with time. There is good depth here, fine density with plenty of sinew toward the saline-tinged finish. Range: 90-92
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.