Winemaker Notes
This traditional dessert wine is honey-yellow color, with flavors of dried fruits, apricot,orange zest and herbs.
An ideal pairing wine for foie gras, fruit-based desserts and creamy desserts like crème brûlée and cheesecake.
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2010 Vinsanto 4 Years Barrel Aged is a traditional blend, mostly (80%) Assyrtiko, with the rest evenly divided between the island's typical blending grapes, Aidani and Athiri. It comes in with 13% alcohol and 220 grams of residual sugar. It is easy to dismiss this, the one with "merely" four years in the barrel. Relatively speaking, as it is the youngest of the group this issue, it is very concentrated this year. It is pretty fine on its own terms, fresher and perceptibly sweeter than the oldies—the sugar has not dried out and blown off—if less nuanced, complex and concentrated than the older bottlings. Yet this has a long, tense and vibrant finish, with plenty of sugar but also fine fruit. It really doesn't seem cloying, despite my relative description. It held brilliantly for four days in the fridge, acquiring more character and showing plenty of tension at that point.
-
Decanter
Sweet fig, dates and prunes on the nose. The palate is mouth-coated with caramel and orange créme brûlée. With a persistent finish.
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.
