Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Tasted at the Disznóko vertical in London, the 2008 Tokaji Aszu 5 Puttonyos is a blend of 70% Furmint, 20% Zéta and 10% Hárslevelu, the maceration mostly with finished wine. This has an exceptional bouquet: Satsuma and mandarin, quince and marmalade, wonderful mineralite and tension. The palate is very well balanced with mandarin, lime, orange rind and a touch of quince. This is edgy, a more unpredictable yet compelling Tokaji from Disznoko with a very long and sustained finish. This comes highly recommended—an outstanding 5 Puttonyos.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Made from 70% Furmint, 20% Zeta, and the rest Harslevelu that’s all from the Discnoko Vineyard (this is one of the few estates in Tokaji to be on a single vineyard), the 2008 5 Puttonyos offers gorgeous notes of orange blossom, honey, caramelized pineapple, and exotic flowers. It’s full-bodied, elegant, and silky, with perfectly balanced sweetness and acidity. This cuvée spent 24 months in 25% new oak and is a beautiful dessert wine.
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.
Best known for lusciously sweet dessert wines but also home to distinctive dry whites and reds, Hungary is an exciting country at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. Mostly flat with a continental climate, Hungary is almost perfectly bisected by the Danube River (known here as the Duna), and contains central Europe’s largest lake, Balaton. Soil types vary throughout the country but some of the best vines, particularly in Tokaj, are planted on mineral-rich, volcanic soil.
Tokaj, Hungary’s most famous wine region, is home to the venerated botrytized sweet wine, Tokaji, produced from a blend of Furmint and Hárslevelű. Dry and semi-dry wines are also made in Tokaj, using the same varieties. Other native white varieties include the relatively aromatic and floral, Irsai Olivér, Cserszegi Fűszeres and Királyleányka, as well as the distinctively smoky and savory, Juhfark. Common red varieties include velvety, Pinot Noir-like Kadarka and juicy, easy-drinking Kékfrankos (known elsewhere as Blaufränkisch).