Winemaker Notes
Château Suduiraut 2009 has a very appealing, bright golden yellow color. Its complexity is echoed on the nose: candied tropical fruit, white flowers, gingerbread, and gunflint give together a rich yet lively overall result. The palate is very powerful, with aromas of roast pineapple, candied apricot and barley sugar. Its smoothness is always underpinned by wonderful freshness, giving it great elegance. The long, full-bodied finish reveals spices, candied fruit and vanilla. This legendary Suduiraut is still coming into its own and requires a little more patience.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Vibrant and dense, the 2009 Suduiraut reveals a complex, deep bouquet of ripe orchard fruits, dry apricots, spices, pineapple, exotic fruits and spices. This is followed by a medium to full-bodied, rich and concentrated palate with a seamless texture and a fleshy core of fruit that finishes long, mineral and saline, underlining beautifully controlled power. With 160 grams of residual sugar, the highest level in this vertical tasting, this blend of 93% Sémillon and 7% Sauvignon Blanc.
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James Suckling
Yummy young Sauternes with caramel, honey, dried apples, pears, and tarte tatin. Full body, layered and compacted. Medium sweet and a flavorful finish. So much to come still. Give it three or four years to understand all it has.
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Wine Enthusiast
The new-wood smokiness is an important element of this creamy-textured wine. The richness bares flavors of honey, botrytis, almond and orange peel. Ripe and age worthy, this wine's opulence is just beginning to show. Cellar Selection
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Wine Spectator
This is loaded, with gorgeous papaya, mango, yellow apple and creamed peach flavors carried by salted caramel, toasted coconut and ginger cream notes. Very long on the finish, this just sails on and on. Showing terrific range and depth, this has a long life ahead of it. Best from 2014 through 2035.
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.