Winemaker Notes
Blend: 89% Semillon, 11% Sauvignon Blanc
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This is divinely sweet without ever becoming cloying. A blend of 89% Sémillon and 11% Sauvignon Blanc from grapes grown in Coombsville, it offers a clean, creamy palate of peat, caramel, vanilla wafer, nuts and honey. If a finishing touch of sweetness is needed at the end of any meal, this is your wine.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: Whenever I have the chance to taste the Dolce, I ask myself, "Why do I need to go to Sauternes?" While it is often hard to pass up the best sweet wines from Bordeaux, the Dolce is just a couple of hours by car for me. TASTING NOTES: This wine is rich and opulent. Its aromas and flavors of dried peaches, smashed apricots, and savory earth make it a dessert onto itself, but pair it with a winter apple torte. (Tasted: January 11, 2019, San Francisco, CA)
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Wine & Spirits
The team at Far Niente farms 20 acres of semillon and sauvignon blanc in the southwestern corner of Napa Valley, and built a separate winery to produce this botrytised wine. It ferments in new oak barrels for six months, then ages for three years before the top barrels are selected for the blend. The 2012 has the wheaty richness of semillon and the honeysuckle scent of botrytis. It’s draped with honeyed flavor, then finishes clean. For hazelnut biscotti.
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.
Situated in the southeastern corner of Napa Valley in the Vaca range, the vineyards of the Coombsville AVA enjoy a long growing season mitigated by cool, San Pablo Bay fog.