Winemaker Notes
Blend: 94% Semillon, 6% Sauvignon Blanc
The Barrel Sample for this wine is above 14% ABV.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The flagship Sauternes, the 2019 Château Suduiraut is 94% Semillon and 6% Sauvignon Blanc brought up in 50% new French oak. A stunning bouquet of caramelized peach, orange marmalade, honey, lavender, and citrus pith gives way to a medium to full-bodied Sauternes with impressive sweetness, a rich, expansive mouthfeel, and a vibrant spine of freshness that keeps it lively and balanced.
Barrel Sample:94-96 -
Wine Enthusiast
While the wine is not ultrarich in texture, it is beautifully balanced between zesty citrus and plenty of serious botrytis and honey flavors. Showing a delicious orange marmalade character, it is ready for aging.
Barrel Sample: 94-96 -
James Suckling
Dried pineapple, apricot, fig and acacia honey on the nose. Some stem ginger and lemon pie, too. Sweet and luscious with dried fruit that’s layered with toast and spice. Fantastic concentration and length.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Suduiraut stands out as one of the most comprehensive and impeccably crafted wines from the Sauternes region in this solar vintage. Offering up a complex, spicy bouquet of curry leaf, cardamon, white pepper, ripe orchard fruits and menthol mingled with touches of vanilla pod and pineapple, followed by a medium to full-bodied, round and gourmand palate, it’s also concentrated and rich with a perfumed, fleshy core of fruit that segues into a long, mineral and ethereal finish. This blend of 94% Sémillon and 6% Sauvignon Blanc.
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Wine Spectator
Clean, ripe, pure and long, showing seamless white peach, quince, ginger, almond cream and green fig flavors that glide through, ending with style, a touch of panache and a bitter almond note that echoes. A step ahead of the field in this vintage. Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc. Drink now.
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.