Winemaker Notes
This wine is hand crafted at every stage of its elaboration and reveals remarkable finesse and complexity with a golden color reminiscent of the sun that made it possible. With age the bright gold evolves to a dark amber color. With an extensive life-span, it powerfully and harmoniously combines fruit and floral aromas with roasted and candied notes. Its superlative elegance comes from a match of total opposites: a voluptuous texture, mineral freshness and the heat of spices. Chateau Suduiraut is designed for all those who enjoy sensory and emotional experiences that are both rich and full of surprises and leave a lasting memory.
Blend: 94% Semillon, 6% Sauvignon Blanc
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2017 Chateau Suduiraut is 94% Semillon and 6% Sauvignon Blanc, with 240 grams of residual sugar. It has rocking botrytis notes of honeyed citrus, orange blossom, white flowers, and caramelized peach. These carry to a full-bodied, beautifully pure, precise Sauternes that has good acidity, flawless balance, and just fabulous purity of fruit. It's a brilliant Sauternes.
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James Suckling
Yum. Aromas of orange blossom, lemon curd, dried apricot and cooked pears fill the glass. It’s full-bodied and very sweet, yet tangy and lively from the vibrant acidity. Extremely long on the finish. Better in 2025, but already a joy to taste.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
More floral and elegantly perfumed than its 2015 and 2016 counterparts, the 2017 Suduiraut exhales aromas of white flowers, peaches, plums and ripe orchard fruits. Medium to full-bodied, round and enveloping with a delicate, fleshy core of fruit, it’s perfectly balanced with a stunning "rôti," the consequence of noble rot. It concludes with a long, penetrating and mineral-laden finish, showcasing the wine's youthful expressiveness. This blend of 94% Sémilllon and 6% Sauvignon Blanc contains 140 grams per liter of residual sugar.
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Wine Spectator
This is a step apart from the pack, featuring a range of papaya and mango fruit typical for the vintage, augmented by white peach, nectarine and Anjou pear flavors. Shows a gorgeous mouthfeel from start to finish, with light jasmine and orange blossom notes infused throughout. Ends with a seductive finish of warmed coconut and piecrust. Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc. Drink now through 2040.
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.