Winemaker Notes
An exceptional dessert wine, with prolonged oak aging for greater depth and character. Richamber in color, this vinsanto is rich with flavors of raisins, figs, and butterscotch, yetbalanced, cut by a still vibrant acidity.
An ideal pairing wine for goat cheese and foie gras, as well as caramelized desserts like crèmebrûlée, and desserts with almonds and fruit.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2001 Vinsanto 12 Years Barrel Aged is a blend of 80% Assyrtiko and 10% each of Athiri and Aidani. Sun-dried grapes are aged in French oak for 12 years. It comes in at 13.5% alcohol and 240 grams per liter of residual sugar. This takes the 2009 "4-Year" this issue and substitutes a lot of complexity for the unctuous and exuberant fruit of the relative youngster, plus there's more concentration as well. Here, the acidity is also a little more obvious at first, but the first thing you'll notice up front is the change in the flavor profile—the flavors lean more to darker chocolate (with a frosted, sugary overlay) than apricots. We're not quite yet at full-on molasses nuance (that will be the "20 Year"), but we're getting there.
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Wine & Spirits
A blend of assyrtiko with ten percent each athiri and aidani, picked ripe, sun-dried and aged in barrel for 12 years, this was bottled in 2013. It’s as creamy and dense as a warm salted caramel, with a similarly luxurious texture, and it’s packed with flavor, from fresh apricot to notes of burnt orange, cinnamon, leather and citrus zest that take the edge off the sweetness. Heady and concentrated, this will age well for decades.
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.
